I have a new obsession – nut creams. I’d never really heard of nut creams until I saw a demo of a Vitamix blender at the weekend. Rather impressive it was, yet extremely pricey for a blender, albeit one that can make silky smooth cream from just nuts and water.

The cream demonstrated by the Vitamix guy was cashew cream, which I came home and tried to reproduce in my mini chopper. It took a lot of whizzing, but I was able to make it almost smooth, and with the addition of some agave and strawberries, I created a rather lovely and pretty much guilt-free ice cream. Picture to follow.

Today’s quest has been to transform brazil nuts into a creamy carbonara sauce. It was incredibly simple but again, took an awful lot of whizzing in my mini blender to get it anywhere near smooth. I blended about 100g brazil nuts with maybe 3/4 cup of water (but I added a bit more later as it wasn’t quite loose enough). The texture was improved by whizzing in a nice ripe avocado. I stirred the resulting cream into 3 pieces of bacon I’d fried off, some left over chicken, both chopped pretty small, and a handful of frozen peas. Voila!

I stirred mine into some zoodles (aka courgette spaghetti) and the boys had theirs with some ordinary pasta, with plenty of parmesan and a bit of black pepper.

We even got to eat it in the garden because the weather was so nice. Bring on spring!