Mango Cashew Stirfry

Remember Jalapeno Indecision 2006? I’ve finally decided on a recipe to use them up (most of them, anyway.)

I wanted to make a main dish, so recipe Runners Up for the Jalapeno Challenge are:
Peanut Butter Stuffed Jalapeno Poppers (!)
Jalapeno Brownies
How awesome do those sound?!

Many thanks to Melody of the very excellent Melomeals for being the unwitting inspiration for this dish. She gave me an awesome vegan baked jalapeno “popper” idea using cashew cream (see the comment here), and them my mind drifted to cashews, Thailand, juicy mangos, exotic men in hula skirts, and (focus, Vanessa!) this recipe idea.

Adding to this exotic adventure is my friend The QueenBee. She whisked me out of Brooklyn for a suburban ingredients-gathering safari to Whole Foods, Trader Joes, The Cheesecake Factory, and Old Navy. Old Navy was her idea, I swear, and she made me buy that faux-Members Only jacket under penalty of walking my carless butt home 50 miles. The trip really was pretty exotic: we spotted a Great Blue Heron gliding over the expressway and, morbidly, what looked like a dead penguin on the side of the road.

The safari was successful and I was able to gather ingredients to make the hot hot hot Mango Cashew Stirfry.

Serves: 3-4
Time: about 1 hour – lots of chopping!

Mango Cashew Stirfry

2 cups raw cashews
peanut oil
4 jalapenos (green OR red, red would be prettier), deseeded and minced
1 ½ inches ginger, minced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbl minced lemongrass
2 mangos, peeled and cubed
3 large handfuls green beans with the ends snapped off (buy 4 handfuls so with the ends off it’s closer to 3)
1 bunch of green onions, sliced
3 Tbl soy sauce
3 Tbl vegetarian stirfry sauce (found it next to the oyster sauce in the Asian section)
juice of 1 lime, more wedges to serve
handful of cilantro, chopped

Serve with jasmine rice

In a stirfry it’s always a good idea to get all your ingredients chopped and ready to go. So deseed and mince your jalapenos, peel and mince the garlic and ginger. Mince your lemongrass. Peel the mangos, and cut away large chunks from the seed that you can chop into cubes. Snap your green beens. Slice your green onions. Juice or quarter your lime.

Now it’s time to get cookin. Heat the peanut oil in a skillet/wok and over medium heat stirfry the cashews for about 5 mintues. Stir constantly to assure an even golden brown. Drain on a paper towel.

Add the jalapeno, garlic, ginger, and lemongrass to the wok and stirfry for about 5 mintues. Add the greenbeans, stirfry another 5 mintues. Then add the mango, green onions, vegetarian stirfry sauce, soy sauce and lime juice. Return the cashews to the wok and cook until heated through. Throw in the cilantro at the very end.

Serve with jasmine rice, soy sauce, more hot sauce if you’re crazy, and lime wedges.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 7:33 pm and is filed under Stovetop & Skillet, Any Season. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.