National Cashew Day- A great excuse to gorge on delicious food

We love celebrations - religious or otherwise and swear by calorie ridden sweets prepared in shudh ghee, and sprinkled with crunchy nuts. Infact ghee laden sweets, prepared with milk and nuts are a quintessential requirement at most religious festivals. Whether it's the all-time favourite kaju katli, yummy gajar ka halwa, that's garnished with cashews, the cashew barfi or the yummy marzipan that makes its appearance during this time of year. Cashews have always enjoyed a special place on the festive platter. And with November 23, being marked as National Cashew Day in America, it's a good reason to find out more about this nutty ingredient that has so many avatars - used in sweets, fried as a salty, savoury snack, transformed into a thick paste to lend texture to rich aromatic Indian graveries, roasted and consumed as a quick bite to go or distilled and bottled to create Goa's famous cashew feni. The cashew nut has a huge fan following in culinary circles because of its versatility.

Tracing its origins
Chef Ranveer Brar, senior executive chef at Novotel Mumbai Juhu Beach says, "Cashew nut was bought into Goa and Cochin by the Portugese from Brazil along with tapioca, papaya and guava. Cashew then traveled southwards towards Ceylon and Indonesia. Originally cashew roasting in Goa used to happen in the open with enough space for the toxic resin fumes to escape. Most of it was done on a flame in a large metal hemisphere. The technique of drum roasting is a more evolved form in which a drum half full of cashews was manually rotated over a flame causing an even colour and a crunchier texture to form."
He adds, "I have been fortunate to taste some very unique dishes prepared using cashews like the
cashew sprout salad in the Malabar region of Kerala where the cashews that fall of the tree are allowed to germinate and the young sprout is used as a salad ingredient or lightly stir fried."

Try this at home
CASHEW AND SNAP PEA STIR FRY
Ingredients
20-25 snap peas

1 radish

10-15 spring onions

1 ginger

2 tbsp rice vinegar

20-25 roasted cashew nuts

2 tbsp soya sauce

2 tbsp chilli sauce

sesame oil to fry

salt to taste

For garnish
Ginger juliennes
Radish juliennes
Sea salt

Method
Firstly, cut the snap peas, radish, spring onion and ginger. Now, mix rice vinegar, ginger and salt in a bowl. After this, heat sesame oil in a pan and toss soaked ginger, cashew nuts along with snap peas in it. Next, add sea salt, radish, soya sauce, and garnish with ginger and radish juliennes. Your cashew and snap pea stir fry is ready.
Recipe courtesy Chef Gautam Mehrishi, executive chef at Sun N Sand hotel

Cashew trivia
India has emerged as a largest market for cashew where the demand of cashew for consumption has been steadily increasing over the years. On an average 150 to 160 thousand tonnes of kernels produced in India were get absorbed in Indian markets itself.
This wonderful nut is native to Brazil. And grows out of the cashew apples. Considered third in consumption among all the tree nuts in the world, they're great when mixed with raisins, dried cranberries, shredded coconut, sunflower seeds, and other nuts, such as almonds and walnuts.
Cashew butter is a staple in many European kitchens around the world, and they're a crunchy, delicious addition to any stir-fry.
Cashew plants don't begin to bear nuts for three to five years, and then another eight to 10 weeks is needed to develop them to full maturity. The nuts themselves are hidden, however, inside an outer coating, sometimes called cashew apples - a false fruit, if you will - used for such things as brake linings, varnish, and insecticides. In light of that, it's important to remove this outer layer carefully, because it's toxic.
The cashew nut in its natural state contains poisonous oil. Roasting removes the oil and makes the nuts safe to eat.
Research shows that roasting cashews and the thin skin between the nut meat and the shell, called testa, actually produced higher levels of beneficial nutrients than eating them raw. More specifically, the antioxidant activity of cashew nuts increased as the roasting temperature increased.