Daring Cooks-July Challenge-Make your own Nut butters

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.

Woo, I was excited about this past month's challenge, since I have actually NEVER made my own nut butter before! And it's so simple and DELICIOUS! I chose to make cashew butter, since that is usually the only nut I have on stock, and whirled them around in the vitamix with a touch of olive oil and a dash of sea salt. Holy yum! We were supposed to make one of the recipes given, but I just picked one to be inspired by (and none of the choices given were vegan anyways). Since I have a gazillion veggies in my fridge, I chose to make a raw, asian-inspired salad. The original called for noodles, and I decided to make raw zucchini noodles instead. Now, I have done this before, but made the mistake of not letting the zucchini sweat out some of the water it contains, and I was left with a watery salad. This time, I was prepared! I sliced them into skinny strips and set them in the colander with a bit of sea salt sprinkled on them for about an hour. It was amazing how much the texture had changed after an hour. I rinsed the salt off and dried the "noodles" with a towel and they were good to go! Cut up any veggies you have laying around and mix in the dressing. This dressing was really simple, but bold in its nut butter awesomeness.

Cashew dressing
2 TBS Raw Cashew butter
1 TBS Apple Cider Vinegar
1 TBS Shoyu
1 TBS Olive Oil
1/2 tsp grated fresh ginger
1 clove garlic
salt and pepper to taste

Mix together briskly with a fork and you're good to go!

I got ambitious and made a second dish, basically taking the salad and putting them into spring rolls and searing them. I love spring rolls!