Curried Trail Mix from the Tomb Raider Cookbook
The next dish I made from the Tomb Raider Cookbook was Curried Trail Mix, a snack in the Asia & Oceania chapter. While many of the recipes have a country of origin, this does not, so it's more or less an invented recipe inspired by Asian flavors.
Curried Trail Mix is made with a mixture of cashews, almonds, peanuts, pistachios and dried edamame, flavored with brown sugar, salt and curry powder, and then topped with coconut before baking.
I don't tend to eat nuts very much, since they have a nasty habit of getting stuck in the grooves of my teeth when I've chewed them up. I will eat them on occasion though, and I thought this would be a unique and refreshing change of pace for them. Most of the time, I keep nuts in the freezer to preserve their life and take them out when I want to top a curry with something crunchy. I had frozen containers of cashews, almonds and peanuts, but not quite enough cashews. Luckily, I had a bag of mixed nuts, including cashews, and I was able to get enough from that to fill a cup.
The challenge with this recipe proved to be in finding dried edamame and pistachios. Dried edamame are not natively available in stores near me, potentially except for health food stores where they'd be twice the price. When I made this, pistachios were under recall where I live if they came from Iran. I therefore had to source pistachios that came from America, and order dried edamame from Amazon, which I try not to do so often anymore.
Making the Curried Trail Mix is very simple. Once you've measured out all your ingredients, you simply need to melt your sugar and spices in coconut oil (I used vegetable oil since it's what I had), stir the nuts into it, then put them onto a parchment paper-lined baking sheet and bake them, topped with shredded coconut. I found that the sugar and oil were not emulsifying into one, but then I don't think they're ever supposed to. You simply want to melt the sugar, bloom the spices and have everything ready to coat the nuts.
They came out deliciously! Full of flavor, slightly sweet, crunchy, and warming to the mouth but not spicy. Not that I'd mind that, but if you're eating Trail Mix for its intended purpose (as an energy booster on the hiking trail), you don't want to be eating something spicy if you have to conserve water or don't have anything to cool down your mouth. In my case, I put them into a jar to keep at my desk so I could snack on something when I needed to.
If you want to make this recipe for Curried Trail Mix yourself, you can find it in Tomb Raider: The Official Cookbook and Travel Guide.
