Nut Meat

There is tiny vegetarian Thai place on King St in Newtown (it's actually just called Vegetarian Thai) that sells really tasty vegetarian rice paper rolls for $5 - possibly the cheapest healthy feed on King St. The most amazing thing about the rolls is this ingredient they have inside which tastes like chicken. Curious as to what it was, Claire asked the people behind the counter and turns out it's something called nut meat, sold in cans at supermarkets.

I happened to be at Woolies later that night, and decided to get one to try. Wasn't easy - I walked the floor of the entire Woolies with no luck, the guy I asked had no idea what it even was and had to ask his supervisor who pointed me to the health food aisle. After scouring the entire aisle back and forth for a good 10 minutes I found it hiding in a corner on the top shelf. It's that same feeling of extreme accomplishment as when you finally find all the characters in a particularly difficult Where's Wally.



As you can see, when I tipped it out it was more like brown spam than the tasty chicken-y thing in the rice paper rolls. I tried a little bit of it raw straight out of the can, and it tasted like peanuts. Figures, right?

The instructions on the can said to grate the glob and mix it with some garlic and what not to make patties, but I'm quite lazy when it comes to cooking, and so I decided to just cut some up into patty shapes and fry them with chopped garlic and onion. You can never go wrong with garlic, onion and salt when you're frying things, I've learnt.



Turns out though, just because you can never go wrong with those three doesn't mean it will always taste good. Unfortunately because I just cut them up into thick slices, the patties still tasted heavily of peanuts in the middle where the garlic, onion and salt couldn't reach. It wasn't horrible, but it just makes for a really strange combination of tastes - initially you get the familiar crispy, salty taste of fried food on the outside, but then you bite in and BAM! PEANUT BUTTER! Takes a lot of getting used to.

This first attempt at cooking nut meat wasn't quite a success, but I guess it was my fault for being lazy and not preparing it properly. There is still some in the fridge right now (although not sure how long these things can keep once opened) which I will try to make again, properly.