Yes, I know, its been quite a while since I've said hello on here. The reason? My last semester of classes as an undergrad! My last semester at Brigham Young University Idaho began in January and man is it a beast! Its taking up all of my time, so even though I've been experimenting with yummy recipes, I've had no time to post them! Back in December I meant to write a post about the cute gingerbread houses my hubby and I made (completely from scratch!). But I just got busy and haven't found time to post until now. But gingerbread houses will have to wait till another time. Today is for peanut butter.
Last month, McKay and I realized that we still had over $100 on gift cards to Bed, Bath, and Beyond from our wedding. We got excited and started looking at what we wanted to get with the money. We settled on a pretty nice food processor. We had been wanting to try our hand at homemade hummus and I had seen some nut butter recipes I wanted to try. So we made the purchase and waited for our lovely Cuisine Art food processor to arrive. I was so excited, and it came so quickly! We made hummus that night, but are still experimenting with the recipe, so that will also come later. Our next experiment with the food processor was peanut butter.
Peanut butter is probably the easiest thing to make! All you do is put 16 oz of peanuts into the food processor and turn it on. Thats it. Really.
You might not believe me, because at first it looks like this and you wonder how it will ever become smooth creamy yumminess. But just be patient...
It takes between 5-10 minutes, but it will slowly become peanut butter....
As the food processor does its thing and the peanuts get more chopped up, they release oils that will moisten it all up and the peanut dust will start to become a ball of peanut dust all stuck together...
And after just a little longer it looks like this:
Yum!
If you like chunky peanut butter you can toss a handful of peanuts in at this point and pulse the processor a few times to get the chunks. I like my peanut butter nice and smooth though, so this is how it stayed. When you first finish it, its fairly warm from the spinning blade. This means that you can practically pour it into whatever airtight container you plan to store it in. I'd recommend storing it in the refrigerator since there are no preservatives in it, but it should last a good month (if not longer!).
The first time we made our own peanut butter we also threw in about a 1/2 cup of chocolate chips into the food processor. The heat and the blade melted/chopped those up and we got a nice chocolatey-peanuty butter that was delish to just eat on a spoon. That's pretty much how we ate the whole jar :)
Any who, try it, its delicious and so easy. Plus its pure peanuts! How cool is that? Have fun!
