Weekend Carnivore

Part of what I enjoy so much about exploring vegetarian cooking is that it forces me to learn whole new cooking techniques.  Often, the new techniques aren’t even especially complicated.  It is just that I would never have thought of preparing a recipe in that way prior to taking up vegetarian cooking. Learning to make my own natural nut butters is an example of one of those new (to me) vegetarian cooking techniques.

I was taking part in the Recipezaar world tour cooking challenge (if you love to cook you need to visit Recipezaar!) and one of my teammates, WiGal
posted a recipe for homemade macadamia nut butter. I have always loved the creamy indulgent taste of macadamia nuts but I had never before thought of making them into a nut butter. I had considered trying to make other nut butters in the past but always thought it would just been too complicated for me to attempt.

So, when I saw her recipe for the homemade macacamia nut butter and just how simple it sounded I knew that I had to give it a shot. Just how easy is it? Well, you put a bunch of macadamia nuts into a food processor and keep it running until the nuts start to form a paste. Really, that is all it took!

How much more natural can something get then just using the one ingredient. My macadamia nuts were natural and hadn’t been toasted, roasted or anything making them taste just of themselves. Which really is a lovely pure taste. I made mine into a lovely vegetarian breakfast by spreading the homemade nut butter over a toasted cinnamon bagel and drizzling it with honey.

homemade macadamia nut butter

On its own, the homemade macadamia nut butter is fine for vegans too. Just skip the honey and find something vegan friendly to serve it on.  I  love all the possibilities this technique for making homemade nut butter opens up. I would think the possibilities only end when you run out of a different type of nut to try. However, I am thinking my next attempt at making my own nut butter will be with raw cashews.  I think that would work just as well.

Go on and try your hand at making your own vegetarian nut butter by checking out the macadamia nut butter recipe on Recipezaar and when you do be sure to rate the recipe and let WiGal know what you think!

There are so many times when I need to have a breakfast quickly but I don’t want to reach for anything unhealthy. Usually, these are also the same times when I am on my own which just makes it all the more difficult to come up with something other than yet another bowl of cereal. The good news is that once you get familiar with a wide variety of fruit you can come up with a healthy vegetarian breakfast that is ready nearly as fast as that dreaded bowl of bran flakes.

When I came up with this vegetarian breakfast recipe, I was at the start of my love affair with Greek yoghurt. I have been lactose intolerant since I was an infant and so I tend to try to avoid most dairy. So, when I discovered that, for some reason, Greek yoghurt doesn’t cause my guts to churn like most dairy I went through a period of obsession with it. Which is not a bad thing at all because even the fat free variety of Greek yoghurt I tend to use is really thick and creamy. When you add that it is also really healthy than there is no reason not to make it a regular feature of your diet.

I have found that it works especially well when I want to do a fruit based breakfast and that is exactly what happened with this tropical fruit breakfast that I came up with one morning. I had a part of a mango left but not enough to do a big recipe. So, I chopped it up, threw in some banana and topped it with the Greek yoghurt. It was still missing something. So, I reached for a passion fruit and scraped the pulp out and put it on top of the yoghurt. The passion fruit worked beautifully to sweeten the Greek yoghurt without the need for additional sweetener.

So, here you have it:

Tropical Fruit Breakfast For One

tropical fruit breakfast recipe

Ingredients:
2 ounces mangoes, cut onto small chunks
2 ounces bananas, cut in half lengthwise and then chopped
1 passion fruit, pulp of
3 teaspoons low-fat Greek yogurt or low-fat plain yoghurt

Directions:
1. Put the mango and banana into a bowl.
2. Scoop the pulp out of the passion fruit and gently mix in with the mango and banana.
3. Transfer to your serving dish and top with yoghurt.

Serves 1