Food on Friday: one measly thing

I had the Food on Friday post halfway written in my head earlier this week, but right now at the moment when I need to actually type it out, I've lost interest. I don't want to give up on the "Food on Friday" plan when I'm only on the second week, though, so I came up with an alternative idea, which is to tell you the amazing thing I tried with natural peanut butter this week.

Oh, yeah, we are all about the reader experience here at AB3. I don't know how you stand the excitement.

I love peanut butter. Adore it. I didn't when I was a kid--couldn't stand the stuff and wouldn't touch peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, just one of many reasons my mother probably thought about selling me to the gypsies.  Now I know that it was the grape jelly I disliked, not the peanut butter, but at the time, I wasn't going to touch a pb&j.

But eventually I figured out that I like peanut butter, and then sometime when I was in high school I had some real peanut butter, the "natural" kind without hydrogenation, and I adored it. Crunchy is even better.

But we all know the problem with natural peanut butter--when you buy it, it is covered with half an inch of peanut goo that has to be stirred down in before you can eat it. And that means making a big, gloopy, oily mess, and no matter how hard you try, there is always about a half-inch of cement-hard peanut butter at the bottom that doesn't get any oil stirred into it. (There are several brands of no-stir "natural" peanut butter but they don't taste nearly as good as the real thing.)

So the last half-dozen times I've done it, I've told myself, next time I'm going to dump this in the food processor.  But then I'd have to get the food processor out, and then I'd have to clean it, yadda yadda yadda. I never quite got around to it.

Finally this week I bought a new jar and it was a day I wasn't particularly busy so I decided to try it. Dragged out the food processor, put in the steel blade, poured in the oil off the top, used a fork to get the rest of it out of the jar, whirred it around for about 30 seconds, scooped it back in the jar.

It worked perfectly. The whole thing took less than five minutes, maybe six minutes if you include rinsing off the blade and bowl and throwing them in the dishwasher. Well worth it. And it's way more smooth and creamy than it is when you do it by hand. It's been in the fridge for four days now and it still hasn't separated out.

So there you go. Food on Friday. Oh, and by the way, the pumpkin bars are much better with brown sugar, so I'll go back and fix that. Apologies if it pops back up on your feed.

Have a great weekend.