Week 5 - Native Australian

The theme for Week 5 was Native Australian, but judging from what 90% of people seem to be doing (including me), they should have just named it macadamia nut week. Native Australian was a tough theme. We're literally on the opposite side of the world from Australia (remember the antipodes discussion?) and getting ingredients that are native to Australia, other than macadamia nuts, is quite difficult (if not impossible) and/or very expensive here in the States. I was fairly sure I was going to do something with macadamia nuts pretty early in my search, but that didn't stop me from looking at lots of other recipes and learning about all sorts of ingredients I had never heard of, including bush tomato, paperbark, muntries, wattleseed, lemon myrtle, and Tasmanian pepperberries. The best part about my choice to use macadamia nuts was that the macadamias I got from Trader Joe's were actually a product of Australia! 

Most of the macadamia nut recipes that I found fell into 2 categories - dessert or using mac nuts as a crust for protein like chicken or fish. I didn't want to do either of those so it took me a while to find recipe inspiration that was different. Finally I found this recipe for mango and macadamia chicken, and decided to go with that as a starting point. Mangoes aren't native to Australia, but the dish only really needed to have the macadamia nuts to make it count in my book. 

I didn't want to just make chicken, so I also researched what greens were native to Australia. I came across warrigal greens, which we can't get here but apparently are very similar to spinach. That became an easy choice - sauteed spinach with garlic and macadamia nuts. Along with the mango and macadamia chicken and the sauteed spinach, we finished off an open bag of harvest grains blend, which included couscous, quinoa, orzo, and garbanzos. I don't think any of those are native to Australia, but at least the grains would be topped with 2 dishes that had macadamia nuts!

The ingredients we used for the mango and macadamia chicken were:

- 2 boneless skinless chicken breasts ($2)

- soy sauce, about 2 tsp ($0.05)

- cornstarch for marinade, about 2 tsp ($0.07)

- 1/3 cup chicken broth ($0.05)

- 3 tsp lemon juice ($0.20)

- 2 tsp sesame oil ($0.15)

- 2 tsp mirin ($0.15)

- 1 tsp sugar ($0.05)

- canola oil for stir-frying ($0.10)

- 2 large cloves of garlic, minced ($0.05)

- pinches of red pepper flakes, to taste ($0.05)

- cornstarch for sauce thickening ($0.05)

- chopped mango equivalent to 1 mango ($1.50)

- handful of macadamia nuts, chopped ($2.25)

The chicken portion cost about $6.72. For the spinach, I just used a bag of spinach, about 4 cloves of garlic (minced), and another handful of chopped macadamia nuts, so that came out to about $5. Adding in the harvest grains blend, it came out to a grand total of approximately $13.20. We ate most of it at dinner with only a little bit leftover for another meal, so it wasn't a really cheap dinner. Macadamia nuts (like most nuts) can be expensive!

The first thing to do for the chicken was all the prep work. Mix the soy sauce and cornstarch for the marinade. Chop up the chicken breasts and soak in the marinade for at least 10 minutes (but preferably longer). Make the sauce by mixing together the chicken broth, lemon juice, mirin, sesame oil, and sugar. Mince the garlic, chop the macadamia nuts, and chop the mango. Set aside a small amount of cornstarch (about 1 tsp) in a small bowl for later. I suppose you could do some of the prep work while cooking if you're really fast, but I'm not and I also find with stir-frying that it's so much easier to have everything already prepped because it can go very quickly.

For the stir-fry part, you heat up the wok, add the canola oil, and then when hot, add the chicken. Once cooked, it's time for the garlic and red pepper flakes, and then the sauce. Once everything is mixed into the sauce, add a little water into the bowl with the cornstarch, mix it around, and add to the sauce to get it to thicken. Once it's mostly thickened, you add the mango and then the macadamia nuts. It was a nice thick sauce by the end, perfect for eating over grains.

Making the spinach was pretty easy too. In a separate pan, heat up canola oil, add the garlic, and after a quick saute, add the spinach with some salt, allowing it to wilt. Once it's done, sprinkle it with the macadamia nuts. I used about the same amount of macadamia nuts here as in the chicken dish, but you can barely see them in the chicken dish. They blend into the sauce there but stand out much more here. The spinach was good, but A would have added a little more salt.

In both dishes, we found the macadamia nuts interesting but not really very necessary. They added a crunchy texture to both dishes, but we're quite happy eating stir-fried chicken or sauteed spinach without any crunch. In the end, the very thing I used to make these dishes "Native Australian" was the very ingredient that we felt like we didn't really need. It was a fun experiment though and we liked the flavor of the mango chicken quite a bit. (We eat sauteed spinach with garlic all the time so it was nothing new for us.)

We're glad that we tried this macadamia nut experiment (and we still have a third to a half of a bag of nuts left), but we didn't have a ton of options when it came to making something affordable for Native Australian week. We would love to try some of those other spices and ingredients that are native to Australia, but it's just not really feasible to do for a challenge like this. Hopefully someday we'll make it to Australia and maybe we can taste these native ingredients there!