Are You Nuts About Nuts Too?

Nuts are a lovely way to add protein and those healthy fats that keep your cholesterol well-balanced to your diet. A handful as a snack can do the trick.
But if you regularly replace meat and dairy with nuts, you are also considerably lowering your impact on the environment (not to mention saving animal lives).

As promised, here are some tips and recipes to add more nuts to your diet, be it savoury dishes, sweet snacks, bakes or drinks!

Family Favourite: Peanut Sauce!

Save to say: we love a good peanut sauce.

Did you realise this sauce actually counts as a protein replacement?
With, for example, this Indonesian inspired Gado Gado, you have a healthy dinner, which can be easily adjusted to personal tastes and availability. It also works really well as a party or picnic dish.

(And we’re not denying peanut sauce also pairs beautifully with satay chicken, which has a relatively low environmental impact compared to other meats. But it’s also great on fries, or fried tofu, or … well, you know what you like!)

To Make (a not too small batch of) Peanut Sauce:

Take

1. 2 onions, chopped
2. 4 cloves garlic, crushed
3. 1 teaspoon ground galangal (or ginger)
4. 400 ml coconut milk
5. 200 gr peanuts (or cashews), blended into a paste (or 100% nut butter)
6. 4 tablespoons ketjap manis (or soy sauce, sweetened to taste)
7. 2 teaspoons palm sugar (or brown sugar)
8. 2 teaspoons sambal oelek (or finely chopped chili pepper, should you be in a hurry and out of sambal)
9. Juice of 1 lime, if desired

Sauté onions, garlic and galangal/ginger in a saucepan, and then simply add everything else, and heat while stirring.

For the Gado Gado:

One would typically arrange rice and an array of very shortly boiled (and raw) vegetables around a plate and serve with a good dollop or small bowl of peanut sauce in the middle. Traditionally, hard boiled eggs and prawn crisps are included, but these can easily be left out or replaced with fried tofu, if you want your meal to be vegetarian or even vegan.

As vegetables we suggest (in the amounts that seem reasonable to your party’s tastes and appetites)

1. green beans (traditionally yard long beans, but they are not easy to come by here)
2. carrots, cut into spears
3. bean sprouts
4. cucumber, cut into spears
5. white cabbage, cut into thin strips

But feel free to add what seems good to you and leave out what you don’t like!
Boil the beans and carrots al dente in a few minutes. Whether or not you shortly cook the bean sprouts and cabbage is up to you. (You can also soften the raw cabbage by mixing it with lime juice an hour in advance.)

The vegetables can be prepared ahead and enjoyed cold just as well. The sauce is best eaten warm, though.

Just as Lush: Serundeng!

Another easy but less known way to add that bit of healthy protein to your meal is seroendeng, or serundeng.

This is a traditional Indonesian accompaniment to rice, made of peanuts and grated coconut. Recipes vary from family to family (from quite spicy to almost sweet), so feel free to experiment with the spicing to make your own preferred blend.
I use a bit more peanuts than usual, to make it a proper protein-replacement. These can also be (partially) replaced with pecans.

Ingredients:

1. 200 gr grated coconut
2. 200 gr peanuts (and/ or pecans)
3. 1 small onion
4. 2-4 daun salam or curry leaves (or some bay leaf and a teaspoon of galangal)
5. 3-5 lime leaves (or a splash of lime juice, but it’ll add less flavour and more moisture)
6. 2 cloves of garlic
7. 2 stalks lemon grass
8. 2-4 tablespoons sunflower or rapeseed oil
9. 2 tablespoon brown sugar
10. 2 teaspoons coriander
11. 2 teaspoons cumin

How to make your serundeng:

1. Put your onion, garlic, lemon grass, sugar, coriander and cumin together in a blender or mortar and blend/ mash into a paste. You can use some oil to make it easier to smooth things, should you want to.
2. Heat about two tablespoons of oil in a skillet or frying pan (use less if you already added oil to your spice-paste), add your leaves and spice-paste and fry gently for about ten minutes, until nice and fragrant.
3. Add coconut, coating it with the spices and frying it until just crisp.
4. Take from the heat and stir in peanuts.
5. Leave to cool completely before transferring to a storage container.

A spoonful or two adds lovely flavour and texture to steamed, boiled and fried rice. But it can also give vegetables such as green beans, cabbage and leeks and interesting new Asian touch. Sprinkle over your food generously regularly, to help keep your protein intake sufficient!

Making Your Own Nut Milk

You can reduce your dairy intake by making your own nut milk. And with a nutsack that actually becomes quite easy.

The basic principle is simple:

– Take 500 gr. of nuts of your liking (really, all nuts go) (and you can add seeds as well).
– Soak them in water until softened (about 8 hours should be fine for most, though some types, like cashews and pecans, are typically done within 2).
– Rinse thoroughly and add 500 ml of water.
– Blend.
– Pour into your Nut Sack and squeeze out as much as you can.

And since you are making it yourself, you can:

– add water, if you like your milk a bit thinner.
– add a pinch of salt to enhance flavour.
– sweeten with honey, agave syrup, coconut sugar, or whichever sweetener you like.
– add flavour in the form of cinnamon, vanilla, or cacao.
– go a bit more adventurous and add things as cardamom, ginger, all spice or turmeric.

It is your milk, after all. Make it your own!

And don’t throw out the leftover nut pulp.

Using Your Nut Pulp

The nut pulp that is left over when you make your own nut milk can be used in all kinds of cooking and baking. It can, for example, be used as a mince substitute in pasta sauces and such.
You can use it in baking things such as biscuits, muesli bars and rich filled fruit loafs, but also to add just a bit of bite and nutritional value to your home baked bread, or pizza dough, to name a thing.
And it doesn’t have to be used instantly, you can dry (at low heat in the oven) it and then further grind it into a flour-kind substance, that you can keep a while.

Or use your nut pulp to make these snacks:

1. Mix your nut pulp with as many roled oats as you feel like using. Really, you don’t need to add them, but then again, these snacks actually also work without the nut pulp and just oats. It depends on how much in total you want to have, and what texture you like.
2. Add a good tablespoon of peanut (or any other nut) butter and keep adding bits of nut butter until a nice, coherent sort of dough starts to form.
3. Add very finely chopped dried fruit and/ or grated chocolate and/ or up to two tablespoons of cocoa powder and/ or seeds and/ or honey to taste.
4. Here comes your time to choose:
   • roll into balls and enjoy as such
   • roll into balls and coat these with finely chopped nuts/ grated coconut/ chocolate
   • mix in bits with ice cream to create a cookie dough kind of ice cream
   • use dough as a pie base (can be used in both refrigerated and baked pies)

Enjoy!

And let us know in the comments what your favourite ways of enjoying nuts are …

P.S.: If you want to read more about both the health and environmental benefits of a plant based diet, check back our January blog post for an easy read, or read about the EAT Lancet report.

P.P.S.: If you’re interested in more yummy recipes to help you eat more sustainably, you can check out our Fork Ranger products here.