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.
This month’s challenge was a recipe incorporating some kind of homemade nut butter. Luckily, yours truly works for a company that sells almonds and pistachios and boasts a room entirely filled with samples just there for the taking. We call this the “nut room” and visit it with glee. Anyway, thanks to that nut room and our generally well-stocked combined kitchens, I’m proud to say we prepared this recipe without making any special trips to the grocery store. An impressive accomplishment all on its own.
So we went with almond butter, because the curried tomato almond sauce looked too scrumptious to pass up. Here we have some raw almonds in our cuisinart, waiting to be blended into butter.
We gave it a whirl. Look at it whirling… Oooh…
Added some oil, for consistency.
And we whirled it some more, until our blending skills produced some almond butter at this perfect consistency. We opted for something a little grainier. It could have been smoother, but we were very hungry and impatient. Story of our lives.
As mentioned above, we decided to make the Chicken with Curried Tomato Almond Sauce because we’re just nutty for anything that used Indian spices. But, somewhat paradoxically, we do not actually have any garam masala on hand. Epic fail. Instead we enlisted the help of the interweb and hunted down an easy make-it-yourself garam masala recipe. Here it is from allrecipes.com:
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1 tablespoon ground cumin – CHECK
1 1/2 teaspoons ground coriander – CHECK
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cardamom – NOPE
1 1/2 teaspoons ground pepper – CHECK
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1 teaspoon ground cinnamon – CHECK
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves – NUH UH
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg – CHECK
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As you can see, we were missing a few ingredients, but like the easy going modern ladies that we are, we said oh well and moved on. We also made a mental note to purchase our very own garam masala for future needs.
This is our garam masala plus some pepper, some extra cinnamon, and some shredded candied ginger. We used the candied ginger because we didn’t have the ground ginger that this recipe called for, but we figured a little sugary ginger is always better than none at all.
There may be nothing more delicious that this mass of buttery, indian spiced onions.
So good. Honestly, we probably would have just eaten this delicious mess of onions on some rice…
After mixing the tomato sauce into our onion mixture, we added the almond butter.
Then some milk.
And whisked until it looked like this.
The chicken was prepared and awaiting its introduction to the mixture…
But first, some veg. The recipe called for frozen peas, which we had, but we also had these fresh cut veggies leftover from a sushi making adventure the night before. And since the frozen peas were upstairs and these fresh veggies were already right there front and center in the fridge…
We mixed in the chicken and voila!
We then enjoyed our delicious creation on our laps, aprons still on, kitchen towels still draped across our shoulders. It was divine.
Let’s take a closer look…
[addtoany] Yum