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 post is a little late as I have only just been accepted as a Daring Cook, so brimming with enthusiasm I accepted their July challenge. I did not try and use other Daring Cooks for inspiration.
As I had already planned a Julia meal, I needed to adapt the challenge so it would use ingredients in our kitchen and complement the planned pork chops and ratatouille. That left me with some aged macadamias, so I roasted them up and turned them into a roast macadamia butter, which was surprisingly simple - just add the cooled nuts to the blender, blend on the highest setting and watch as a paste formed. One cup of nuts yielded approximately half a cup of paste.
Salad with Macadamia Nut Dressing
Dressing
1/4 cup macadamia butter
1/3-1/2 cup of lemon juice and water, mixed depending on how acidic you like it
1/2-1 teaspoon of sugar
2 shallots, white parts chopped
salt
pepper
Salad
1 small red pepper, sliced
1/3 iceberg lettuce, washed and separated
1 small cucumber, sliced
1/2 punnet cherry tomatoes
1/2 avocado
Slowly add lemon juice and water to macadamia butter, beating with a whisk. Add shallots using a spoon to combine. Add sugar, salt and pepper to taste.
Arrange lettuce on a platter. Add red pepper, cucumber, tomatoes and avocado.
Spoon approximately half the dressing over the salad. Provide the remainder in a jug.
The macadamia butter made the dressing quite creamy, a nice contrast to the salad. The macadamia flavour was quite strong, possibly because the macadamias were well roasted but the lemon juice balanced it nicely.
I am delighted to have some macadamia butter left in the fridge for something sweet!
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