July Daring Cooks Challenge

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.

I'm currently surrounded by vegetarians, and as such was not about to put any meat in the curry I made.  I do, however, have a soft spot for almonds, so I blended a decent amount of them (that is, the amount that fit in the processor) until the collapsed into butter.  They needed a little oil to help them along, I imagine partly to do with the processor being an attachment to a relatively weak stick blender, and partly to do with almonds being less oily than some other nuts. When done (I got bored), it looked like this:

This would be tasty, but everything is tastier as a curry.  So I went for a tomato based one, with mushrooms and eggplant providing the substance.  One medium sized eggplant, 2 brown onions, 2 cans of diced tomatoes, a couple of dozen mushrooms, some garlic, garam masala, chilli powder and flakes, a little turmeric, salt and pepper.  Curry, of course, is easy.  You brown off the onion and garlic, add the spices (and a dash of stock here, in my case), then the mushrooms and eggplants, cook until beginning to soften, add tomatoes and simmer on low until the rice is cooked.  Then you eat it.

Tasty