I was thinking of just spreading a very thin layer on the guitar’s top, but decided not too. Instead, I slapped on a whole glob of creamy peanut butter. As you can see, gravity decided to take over, and it started to slowly creep down the face of the guitar, onto the carpet. Don’t worry PB lovers, I was able to save it.
Fervor is the weapon of choice for the impotent
[Frantz Fanon]
Mine is 4 pounds of creamy peanut butter.
Every day they come, from far and wide, making the pilgrimage to the Downbeat Café with one thing on their minds: peanut butter. Or, more precisely, peanut-butter cookies: crispy, flaky, slightly crumbly, sand-dollar-size handmade cookies, pasted together with preternaturally smooth peanut-butter filling, that have developed a following. Some fans are casual snackers. Others are die-hard devotees. All are comforted by the sight of that giant glass jar on the counter, which fills up each morning with the day’s batch. And when that jar is empty, there is often panic. I’ve seen it happen: A customer in search of cookies enters, glimpses the barren glass and turns ashen with grief. Recently, a two-day cookie dry spell threatened to sow chaos and confusion into some people’s lives. “Now, they’ve started planning,” says Crissy Carter, who works the morning shift at the Downbeat. “They call in to make sure they’re here.” Arrangements are often made ahead of time to pick up a batch for a party. “I don’t even call them cookies anymore. I call them peanut-butter crazies!” says longtime Downbeat peanut-butter-cookie enthusiast Kelly Sears.
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FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
The average American kid will have consumed 1,500 peanut butter sandwiches by the end of high school. Mmmm.
DEBUNKED
George Washington Carver invented hundreds of uses for peanuts, but he did not invent peanut butter.
According to http://www.peanutbutterlovers.com/, two men began experimenting with peanut butter in the late 1800s.
One was a St. Louis physician whose name has been lost in the mists of time, and the other was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who fed it to patients at his Battle Creek Sanitarium. He was given the patent for peanut butter in 1895. Brother W.K. Kellogg formed the Sanitas Nut Co. and sold peanut butter to local grocery stores.
Peanuts aren’t nuts — they’re legumes, as are peas and beans.
IN A JIFFY
Oct. 5, 2006 — I did this recipe for my show when I had a few kids over.
I thought I was making this for them, but I wound up eating more than all the kids combined!
I guess you’re never too old for Rice Krispies Treats. It’s the chocolate and peanut butter that make these completely irresistible.
6 to 8 servings
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2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 pounds beef stew meat, cut into 1-inch chunks
2 medium onions, chopped
2 cups water
3 medium tomatoes, chopped
1 can (4.5 ounces) chopped green chilies, drained
1/2 teaspoon ground red pepper
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup creamy peanut butter
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In a large soup pot, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Add the beef and onions; stir until the beef is browned. Add the water, tomatoes, green chilies, ground red pepper, and salt. Bring the mixture to a boil.
Reduce the heat to low, cover, and cook for 1-1/2 hours, or until the beef is tender. In a small bowl, combine the peanut butter with 1 cup stew juices, slowly stirring in the juices. Stir peanut butter mixture into the stew and simmer for 2 minutes, or until heated through.
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SERVING SUGGESTION: Serve this over a bed of hot cooked rice to enjoy every last bit of flavor.
1 large egg
2 slices sandwich bread
2 tablespoons peanut butter (crunchy or creamy)
Mayonnaise for spreading
PREPARATION: Heat a non-stick skillet at medium heat until just hot enough to sizzle a drop of water. Gently slip egg into the skillet. Reduce heat to low. Cook slowly until whites are completely set and yolk begins to thicken but is not hard (turning eggs gently to cook both sides).
Spread the peanut butter on 1 side of 1 slice of bread. Spread the mayonnaise on 1 side of the remaining slice. Lay the fried egg on the peanut butter and top with the other slice of bread, mayonnaise side down.
Nutrition information per sandwich: 449 calories, 30 grams fat, 18 grams protein, 29 grams carbohydrate, 4 grams fiber, 215 milligrams cholesterol, 549 milligrams sodium.
Who knew that the little town of New Bethlehem, Clarion County, holds the Smucker’s peanut butter factory? Who knew it holds the Peanut Butter Festival?
Festival chairman Harry Kehr answered the first question with, “If they live in New Bethlehem they do. If they live in Clarion, which is 18 miles away, they don’t. Which is amazing.”
In this borough of 1,700, about 60 miles north of Pittsburgh, the peanut butter plant is one of the biggest employers, with 50-plus workers. And yes, Mr. Kehr said, you can smell it when the peanuts are roasting, which is just about every day.
The word of the festival hasn’t carried very far, he said, in part because the J.M. Smucker Co. is extremely low profile.
Indeed, the Orrville, Ohio-based company doesn’t send out news releases for the event, which a spokeswoman made clear the company does not sponsor.
The factory allows no public tours and isn’t even marked by big signs. But the local operation is one of several sponsors and a most supportive one, said Mr. Kehr, of the Chamber of Commerce, which has organized the annual festival since 1996.
This year’s runs tomorrow through Sunday and looks to be nuttier than ever.
The natural peanut butter factory actually was founded in 1946 as the H.B. DeViney Co. in the former New Bethlehem Brewing Co. It became a Smucker subsidiary in 1965 and now produces all the natural peanut butter products under the Smucker’s, Laura Scudder’s, Adam’s and Santa Cruz Organic labels (but not Jif, America’s best-selling brand, which Smucker now owns, too).
Dark-roast peanut butter
Organic grocery products is not a category in which we expect to see new flavor choices, but that’s what we have from Santa Cruz, which offers light- and dark-roasted organic peanut butter — in both creamy and crunchy, of course.
Find Santa Cruz products (a Smucker’s brand) at Whole Foods, co-ops and some mainstream supermarkets and health-food stores. But don’t bother if you don’t want to stir and refrigerate your peanut butter — or if you favor saltiness or sweetness therein. Both versions have 50 milligrams of sodium and 1 gram of sugar per 2-tablespoon serving; typical supermarket peanut butter has three times as much of each.
Not cracker fantasy
Two no-nonsense cracker variants caught Mr. Tidbit’s eye this week: Keebler’s Town House Toppers are Town House crackers (slightly reformulated), with a raised rim to keep toppings in place (or, as the package puts it, “designed to simplify your topping experience”). Choose garlic & herb or Mr. Tidbit’s perennial flavor favorite, original.
And there’s a new flavor of Triscuits, cracked pepper & olive oil — and they actually taste like pepper and olive oil!
Flavored sparkling cider
Although the previous item might not suggest it, Mr. Tidbit usually is unmoved by new products that are the 17th new flavor of an existing product. But the first departure from “original” of something as basic as sparkling apple cider — especially if it’s from what is said to be Minnesota’s largest apple orchard — probably is worth mentioning. So:
Pepin Heights now offers raspberry and black cherry versions of its 100-percent-juice, no-added-sugar sparkling apple cider. (They do that by mixing apple juice from concentrate, raspberry or black-cherry concentrate and carbonated water.)
AL SICHERMAN