Mmm peanut butter

I make my own peanut butter once or twice a week, depending on how much we feel like eating. I usually buy raw peanuts with the skin on, dry roast them in a frying pan until little black spots appear and then blend blend blend! This takes about 10 minutes, sometimes longer, but the end result is always amazingly delicious. I ahven't bought any peanut butter from the shop in aggges. The homemade stuff does go very solid in the fridge though (no added oil). Which brings me to my next point.

I was given a kg bag of roasted unsalted peanuts by my stepmum (hooray! I was just about to go to the shop to buy more) so I decided to just make the peanut butter from these instead (I don't really like to eat peanuts by themselves).

I stuck two cups of the roasted unsalted peanuts in the blender, turned it on, and in no time at all I had a smooth butter. I didn't even have to scrape down the sides! Ahh and it tastes like the store bought stuff but better. I'm assuming it butterised so quickly because they are roasted with oil. It also doesn't solidify too much in the fridge.

Mmm, peanut butter.

Homemade peanut butter and homemade choko jam on home baked bread. Smug! Hahaha.

Peanut Butter Coconut Cream Pie

Otherwise known as a heart attack. And it was sooo worth it.

Peanut Butter Coconut Cream Pie

Serves 12

Ingredients:

1 pre baked chocolate tart case (I made an oatmeal-buckwheat flour base but didn't write down the ingredients...make your favourite, just add 1 tbsp cocoa powder.

Filling

1 cup peanut butter (I used homemade)

125g vegan cream cheese at room temperature

1/2 cup coconut cream (put a can of coconut cream in the fridge for a few hours. Take it out and open and carefully spoon the thick cream off the top)

Scant 1/2 cup dark brown sugar

2 tsp vanilla extract

Ganache Topping

100g 85% dark chocolate broken up

2 tbsp rice syrup

1/4 cup almond milk

1/4 cup coconut cream

toasted chopped peanuts

Method:

Prepare your crust. I put mine in a springform cake pan.

Put all filling ingredients in a food processor and process until combined. This will get really thick! Though I forgot to bring the cream cheese to room temperature first so that may have had an impact.

Pour into crust and put in the fridge for a few hours or until set.

Meanwhile, make the ganache topping!

Heat the two milks on the stove until boiling. Take off heat and stir in the rice syrup and chocolate. Stir until chocllate is melted - it'll go quite thick. Pour on top of set pie and sprinkle toasted chopped peanuts on top. Put back in the fridge until set.

Serve and enjoy. Every. Bite.

Bring it on! I'm going to try and make this deliciousness last all week. It's very very rich (as you'd expect) and quite high in fat so go easy on it!

I love to use this coconut cream. I probaably shouldn't, but I eat it from the can. Don't let me make curry hahaha. It just tastes so damn good!

Pizza night!

It's been a while since our last pizza night, so we felt the need to make it. This time I decided to add on a bit of fake meat for shits and giggles. I made the 'Big Stick Pepperoni' recipe from Vegan on the Cheap. Man, this stuff is great. The secret ingredient is definately fennel seed, and the flavour is very strong in it. Next time I might cut it down just a tad, it's a little overpowering. Now, I never liked salami, it always grossed me out (always knew what it was , especially after working in a deli and slicing it every day ugh), but since I know this stuff isn't wrapped in fat netting, and is actually cooked and NOT moldy, then it tastes delicious. The texture is odd, as disgusting as this sounds, but it's kind of like a (real) salami that hasn't dried to a hard lump quite yet. So it kind of grossed me out, so before I put it on the pizza I fried it up a tad and it's much better. 

Unfried big stick pepperoni



So on the pizza in order was: tomato paste, caramelised onion, potato, olives, jalapeno pepper, pepperoni and a sprinkling of nutritional yeast. It was just greasy enough from the onions, without having the atery clogging greasiness of cheese on it. We had it with a much needed salad of baby spinach leaves, red capsicum, red onion, capers, radish and apricot kernels with a lemon juice-olive oil and black pepper dressing.

I got apricot kernels at the farmer's market this morning, and they taste like almonds (same species I think) except sweeter and they are about half the size. An excellent addition to a salad. I love adding crunch like nuts and seeds to my salad. I usually go for sunflower seeds but I had these :)

Yum. I look forward to lunch at work tomorrow.

Dangerous Nuts Part 1: Bunya Nut Pikelets

Could you get any more Australian?

So why do I call them dangerous? Well, there is a few reasons.

1.If you sit under a bunya pine while it's in season, you may die. The cones are as big as your head (or bigger!) and can weigh upwards of 10kg. Don't try it. I noticed a tree in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens when I was there last that had a makeshift fence around to stop people having their picnics under it.

2.They can explode. Wear eye protection and stand back if you cook them on a bbq.

3.While trying to pry open a shell on a raw one with a hammer I nearly bashed my finger off.

4.While trying to cut open the shell on a soaked one I nearly chopped off a nipple with the handles of my secateurs. I don't know how, all I know is that it hurt like a motherf*cker. I hope I didn't do any lasting damage!

Okay, so bunya nuts are about as much of a pain in the ass to peel as chestnuts, but not quite. At least these ones stay whole. I looked up all sorts of ways to do it online, but they all sounded hard. One guy said to go outside and hit them with a mallet to crack the shells. I don't have an outside and I don't have a mallet. I could have boiled them whole and then peeled off the shells (with difficulty) afterwards but all my pots and pans were dirty and I couldn't be bothered. I could have roasted them, but I was afraid they'd explode and catch fire because I couldn't split them a little first.

So in the end I decided to soak them overnight in a bowl of cold water, figuring the shells would soften:

And in the morning the shells were indeed soft, so I could hit them a little bit gentler with a hammer than if they were raw-raw:

You can see the cracks in it. A bunya nut has a pointed end and a round end. At the pointed end there are 3 'seams'. Hit the hammer on one of them. The seams will crack and you can peel it.

I decided the hammer freaked me out too much as it was getting too close to my thumbs, so I dug out my secateurs (yes they are rusty and old and under-used and covered in WD-40 and potting mix but did I ever say my kitchen was sanitary?) and decided to just slice off the skins. Use them like a nut cracker first to split the seams (this was way easier than it was with the hammer) and then slice down toward the round end until you can force off the shell.

At this stage the nut can sort of be popped out. You don't have to struggle with pulling off the rest of the skin.

It may come out with a layer of brown stuff on it, like a shelled peanut:

I took it off. Dunno if you have to, I just did.

Now for the cooking. Once you have your desired amount of bunya nuts peeled, give them a bit of a rinse, especially if you used disgusting dirty tools like I did. Mmm WD-40, my favourite!

Then put them into a dry frying pan and cook, as if you were pan roasting cashews to make cashew butter:

Bits will go black and brown and they will smell nice. I had a lid over them for most of it because I didn't have a clean stirring spoon either (I know, I'm a slob) so I could just shake them around. I was also still scared of them exploding in my face (this is unlikely to happen!).

Once they are all browned like in the above picture, put them on a chopping board and use a sharp knife to finely chop like so:

You could just eat them whole too if you like, but this time I decided I wanted to put them in pikelets! Hence the chopping.

I ran a search on google for vegan pikelets as I have never made them before, and found this recipe on The Year of the Vegan which sounded perfect as I had some soft tofu in the fridge I needed to use before it turned yellow.

So I made the recipe exactly as it says except I used wholemeal flour, and didn't have any maple syrup so I used 1 tbsp of rice syrup instead. And at the end of all the whisking, I folded in half a cup of the chopped bunya nuts, and cooked as normal.

I spread vegan marg on them, sprinkled a few extra chopped nuts on top and drizzled them with a good amount of rice syrup. Yum.

(It took me so long to make them all they were cold by the time I got to eat them. But that's ok, they taste better cold and I'm pretty sure pikelets are meant to be eaten cold).

So to wrap up this god awful long entry, what do they taste like??

Well, like nuts, I guess. I want to say they taste like pine nuts (hur, hur!) but I'm not sure what they are like. They have also been compared to chestnuts, and I have to say that's probably the closest thing I can think of too. They have a different texture, quite soft (though that's probably because I soaked them) and were a nice addition to the humble pikelet. Now I have to think of what to do with the rest!! I bought a ½ kilo. Stay tuned for Dangerous Nuts Part 2 :)