date pecan butter

Today I decided to see if I could make a sweet nut butter. The answer is yes, but watch out--it tastes great and is really rich. It is not so easy to make though. I made it in a blender and you need to add a lot of nuts to make it work in the blender, 2 cups works.

Ingredients:

2 cups nuts. I used raw pecans, which were really good!

dates to taste---maybe 2-4 medjool dates (remove pits)

soy milk or nut milk or water--maybe 1/2 cup? depends on the consistency you want.

1/2-1 tsp vanilla (optional).

Blend in a high-powered blender. Blend, mash (with plunger or spoon), blend, mash, blend, add more liquid if you need it. It takes a while to get it blended up. Here's what it looks like:

Housemate had it on bread, I had it with strawberries. It was very yummy. It is very rich and hard not to eat too much. Then housemate ran out of bread and I needed to make her smoothies, so I turned this into cream by adding more soymilk, water, and a few more dates. I had some on top of blackberries and used the rest in the smoothies.

high-calorie foods

I had a guest stay with me for a week, and he's a skinny young guy, and I worried I wasn't feeding him enough. I realized I wasn't giving him any grains so I went and bought some manna bread (sprout wheat grains with raisin and carrots to sweeten it up). This is rich and sweet and delicious---it's like a muffin or cake only better (at least to a nutritarian). Here's what the package looks like:

I thought this would be good with a nut butter of some sort but I didn't have any, so I tried my hand at making some out of walnuts. I used the "dry-blender" container that goes with my vita-mix blender. It looks like a regular container but the blades are backwards so it blends the stuff upward rather than downward. That seems to work pretty well for nuts along with the plunger. I found I needed to add a lot of nuts to make it blend well. I used 2 cups of walnuts. This compacted down to probably only 1/2 cup of walnut butter! Talk about calorie-dense! It was a bit crunchy but I actually liked that. Here's the nut butter:

As it gets ground up, the oils release and it becomes, well nut butter.

It was great on the toasted manna bread. I also made this fun treat to take to work with me:

That's a banana walnut-butter sandwich! ha. it was yummy. and the peel keeps it protected until ready for eating.

The nut butter was also really good on (sweet) corn on the cob. Oh my gosh. decadent.

But now my guest is gone and the nut butter won't re-appear for a while because that is some rich food.