PB & J!

I did a post a while ago about how I made strawberry and blackberry freezer jam. I thought I'd follow it up with my homemade peanut butter recipe.

Let me start by saying that this is NOTHING like Jif, Skippy, or Peter Pan peanut butter. Is much more like the natural peanut butters that you can find at places like Whole Foods. Some of the major brands are also starting to make more natural peanut butter. Before I started making my own, this had been our standard peanut butter for about a year:

If you're not up to making your own (but trust me, it's easy), I would recommend this one. The only ingredients are peanuts and salt, and it is quite yummy.

But, if you are willing to roll up your sleeves for about 3 minutes, you can make your own for much cheaper. Plus, I like to add just a little sweetener to mine. Sometimes its honey, but this time, we had just a little leftover (real, of course) maple syrup. Delish!

I adapted my recipe from Alton Brown's recipe from www.foodnetwork.com.

I bought plain, raw Spanish peanuts. I tried using the ones in the canister, like Planter's, but they have oil and salt already added, and when I roasted them they burnt really fast. I imagine that you could use already roasted peanuts and just skip to the food processor step. I haven't tried, though . I found the raw Spanish peanuts near the nuts for baking, rather than the snack food aisle.

Dump the peanuts onto a cookie sheet. The first time I did this, I peeled the red skin off the peanuts. It took FOREVER, and made a huge mess. This time, I just left them on, and didn't have a problem. Roast the peanuts in a 350 degree oven for 15 minutes or so.

Let the peanuts cool (I left them for several hours, but I think maybe 3o minutes would suffice). Dump them into a food processor, along with about 1-2 teaspoons salt (this is for about 16 ounces of peanuts). Turn on the food processor and drizzle in some oil. Alton says to use peanut oil, but you only need about 2 tablespoons, and I didn't feel like buying a whole container of oil just for peanut butter, so I used canola oil. I'm sure that any vegetable oil would work. Once it's the consistency you like, stop.

This will never be super creamy peanut butter (like Jif). It will always have just a little peanut texture to it, but we like it that way.

At this point, you can add sweetener. Like I said before, I've used honey and maple syrup, and if John would let me have it in the house (he hates the taste!?!), I would try agave nectar. Run the food processor for a few more seconds to incorporate, and dump it in your container of choice.

The first time I made it, I was worried that Cohen wouldn't eat it, so I just washed out our old Smucker's jar and put some of it in there. Since then, I just put it in whatever container I have clean.

Try it! I'm sure that you'll love it, especially in a PB&J sandwich made with your own freezer jam!

Ketchup, A.K.A. my son's favorite food

My son will put ketchup on anything. Last night, we fed him a hot dog and peanuts for dinner (among other things). He not only dipped his hot dog, but also his peanuts, into the last of the organic ketchup that we had on hand.
We buy organic not because tomatoes have to be organic (we have a list of the fruits and veggies that need to be organic, and those that conventional is just fine). We buy organic ketchup because, it is the only ketchup that does not have HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) in it. (Although I just saw a non-organic brand that says right on the label that it is HFCS free - I don't remember the brand). We try as best as we can to keep it out of our house. Occasionally, it slips in, but for the most part, we are HFCS haters.
Organic Ketchup is expensive, as is most organic food. I vowed that as soon as we ran out of it, I would try to concoct my own HFCF-free stuff. I sputtered out the last of our Ketchup last night, and, as I'm fairly certain that we could not go a day without the stuff, I experimented and made some last night.
Naturally, I had done my research. A google search for "homemade ketchup" yielded many methods for making your own ketchup. They ran the gamut from growing your own tomatoes and cooking them down, to buying tomato sauce and doctoring it up. I decided upon a method that starts with tomato paste. Here's what I did:

I gathered together:

tomato paste -organic does taste better,
but I almost went with hunt's brand.

vinegar (yes, we buy vinegar in bulk - there's very little

that a little vinegar or baking soda won't clean)

brown sugar

and various spices I thought would work

I threw it all in a bowl, mixed, and added some water for the right consistency. I ended putting too much brown sugar in, so I had to overcompensate by adding more vinegar. I ended up adding red wine vinegar, white vinegar, and also rice wine vinegar before I was happy with the level of acidity and sweetness. I bottled it up and put it in the fridge overnight.

This morning, I tried it to see how the flavors had melded and was not really happy. I dumped it back into a bowl and added onion powder and a little sriracha for a little heat.


It turned out super complex and yummy. Not so yummy that I'd be willing to dip my peanuts in it, but definitely worthy of some french fries.