nutty butters

Practically everything that is store bought will have added sugar in it.  It frustrates me.  Yoghurts, drinks, spreads, sauces, practically everything.  Check the ingredients for a yoghurt with fruit in it.  Sugar will be the second or third ingredient.  Before the fruit.  I understand why food producers do it, but all the same, it just makes it very difficult for me to buy things, especially for Lily.

I used to be able to find a 100% peanut only peanut butter in the supermarkets here, but I can't seem to find it anywhere now.  So I thought about making my own nut butters.  They're not just good on toasts as spreads, but useful for dressings as well - see my very first post here.

Anyway, I settled on making a walnut butter after reading various blogs - this one has honey and cinnamon in it whilst this only has cinnamon in it.  This one only has walnuts and salt in it, which the one I decided to go for.  I think the oils that the other two recipes called for would bind the walnuts and would make it into more of a paste.  I wanted my walnut butter to be as unadulterated as possible, so I decided against adding any oils, honey or spices.  I did add a pinch of salt, which enhanced the taste.

This is what I ended up with:

 What you would have noticed from the photos of the butters from the different recipes I referred to is that my walnut butter looks very different from the other homemade walnut butters.  Which is interesting, and makes it all the more appealing in my opinion, but I can understand why the lack of uniformity would not work for a mass food producer.

Anyway - this is probably the easiest thing to make, and there's no real reason why you would ever want to buy nut butters from a shop again - apart from the cost of course.  500gms of walnuts cost me $35 ($7/100gms).  That made enough butter to fill a jar that once had about 450gms of peanut butter.  500gms of Planters peanut butter costs about $5 at the moment.  I don't know what walnut butters cost in the shop, but I suspect a lot less than $35.  You can see why making your own nut butters is not an attractive financial choice.   However, the way I see it, I don't eat a jar of peanut butter a day.  That jar of walnut butter will last us months.  And if I don't have to have the nasty added refined sugar in my food, then I'll pay extra for it.

Anyway:

Ingredients:
500g raw walnuts
A pinch of salt - to taste

Tools:

A food processor

How:

I soaked the walnuts for about half an hour.

Drained them, put them on a tray and into an oven at 180 degrees for about 20 minutes.

Let the walnuts cool, while you go out and get a food processor ;-)

Stick walnuts in food processor.

Process until it becomes a paste.  It really takes very little time (3 minutes maybe?) before it becomes this:

And another 1 min before it becomes this:

Add salt to taste.

This is what I got:

I think it's delicious.  Ben doesn't.  It needs sugar, he says.  Sigh...

Let me know how yours turned out.

xAJ

Update:  I used the walnut butter to make a salad dressing.  The ingredients I used for it were: walnut butter, soy sauce, sesame oil and honey.  (Note: I used a little bit too much sesame oil that it overpowered the taste of the walnut butter, so use very little).  I then made a salad like so:

Tossed it with the dressing, and served the salad with some half boiled eggs, like so:

Verdict:  Ben liked it.  Said I can make it again. :-) xAJ

crab cakes!

It's been a while since I visited this blog. Various things have happened in my life, but that's the subject of another neglected blog. Today is Vesak Day, which is a public holiday in Singapore and Malaysia.  We've spent the weekend in KL, and drove back down to Singapore this morning.  The roads were clear, and having left at 6.45am, and with B driving, it meant that we were back home in Singapore at 10am.  Which also means a whole day for me to do lots of studying, which obviously means a whole day for me to do anything else but... (hence this blog!)

I foraged the fridge and found this can of lovely pasteurised crab meat.  I came across it in the fish section at the Market Place a few months ago and bought one.  B made a lovely dressed crab salad with it.  It was so good, I bought another tin.  It's just one of those things that's great to have in the fridge.

 Today I decided to use the crab meat to make crab cakes/patties/burgers of some sort, but more of the Indian style crab cutlet.  I scoured the world wide web for a recipe and decided on this crab cutlet recipe as a base, and to tweak it according to what I had in the kitchen.

Ingredients:

a) 2 tbsp olive oil
b) 1 onion - chopped
c) 3 cloves garlic - chopped
d) 1 inch ginger - julienned
e) 1 tsp cumin
f) 1 tsp fennel
g) 1 tbsp chilli powder

h) About 400gms crab meat
i) About 2 cups cooled boiled rice (we had leftovers in the fridge)
j) 4 tbsp breadcrumbs (we had it in the freezer - this is great to make with stale bread and frozen for when you need it)
k) 1 egg - beaten
l) Salt & pepper to taste

m) Butter or ghee to fry.

How:
Heat the olive oil in the pan.  Add ingredients (b) to (f).  Fry on a medium heat until the onions are soft and the cumin and fennel give off their fragrant smell.  Add chilli powder.  Add a pinch of salt. Fry for a few minutes.  Take off the heat.

Add onion mixture to ingredients (h) to (k).  Mix well.

Shape into patties.  Like so:

Heat butter or ghee in frying pan.  Fry on a medium heat.  About 3 or 4 minutes on each side, I imagine.  Until they look this: 

 Serve with lime wedges.  Squeeze the lime juice on the cutlets - it enhances the taste. 

We had it with a salad, which made for a lovely, satisfying and healthy supper.

Enjoy! If you do make it, let me know how it turned out.

xAJ