Sammy's Dot

(Note: I did take pictures. I even think they are good pictures. If only I could find my camera cable… Hopefully they’ll be up shortly!)

I like peanut butter cookies a lot, but that is (or was) about the extent of my experience in cooking with nut butters. Well, that and peanut butter and honey sandwiches, which are infinitely superior to PB&J and which I happily ate every day for breakfast and lunch when I was little. But I suppose one really can’t count either as “cooking”. This month, the Daring Cooks challenge was intended to break us all out of that rut: the goal was to prepare one or more recipes using a nut butter, ideally homemade.

The July 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by Margie of More Please and Natashya of Living in the Kitchen with Puppies. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make their own nut butter from scratch, and use the nut butter in a recipe. Their sources include Better with Nut Butter by Cooking Light Magazine, Asian Noodles by Nina Simonds, and Food Network online.

Unfortunately, this month the usual sweltering Toronto summer descended – in spades. Day upon day of 30-plus highs, combined with the humidity that makes it feel more like 40, does not in any way inspire me to turn on the stove. Fortunately, our gracious hosts had suggested recipes for a lovely dip that was reminiscent of hummous – and yet at the same time, entirely different – which, with some vegetable crudités and grilled focaccia, made for a perfectly satisfying dinner, as well as a fantastically good cold rice noodle salad with a kicky cashew-butter based dressing. To round things out, with this week’s slightly lower temperatures I fulfilled an old ambition and put together my own interpretation of butter chicken (albeit using paneer), in a riff on the posted recipe for chicken in a curried tomato-almond sauce.

Thoughts upon completion? I’ve never made a habit of buying nut butters, as aside from the usual peanut butter they’re rather expensive, and so never cooked much with them. It’s really good to know now how easy it is to make them in small quantities at home – at least, it’ll be easy so long as my mini-chopper’s motor holds out – and I’ll certainly re-visit the salad and the dip. I played around with the flavourings in both, and more so with the dip, but the bones of both recipes were great. The makhani sauce needs some tweaking, and oh, how I wish I’d asked a former co-worker of mine for her recipe when I had the chance; I know she used cashews and no dairy, but the rest is a mystery. Too, to me it’s a winter dish; the name “butter chicken” doesn’t exactly imply “light”, which is what I want when all I can do is make like Sputnik and sprawl (poor kitty had a much harder time with the heat and humidity than we humans). (more…)