It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time!

Over the past few years and months Jerrod and I have been making a real effort to go more "raw" and "natural" with our eating habits. I can't remember the last time I bought a frozen dinner, it's just as easy to intentionally make extra servings at dinner and use them through out the week in place of these. Part of this decision for me was from a weightloss perspective, but part of it is because it's kind of weird that we put all kinds of things in our body that we have no idea what they are, or even how to say them!

Some of the things we have started regularly making at home include hummus, whole wheat bread, sherbet or frozen yogurt, fruit and vegetable juice and fresh juice popsicles, black bean burgers, and peanut butter!

Yesterday we decided that we would make a "sampler pack" of nut butters for my uncle for his birthday. But then we thought it would be fun to make a set for my parents and grandparents too. We made a traditional creamy peanut butter, a cinnamon cashew butter, a roasted almond butter, and a  dark chocolate peanut butter. This sounds really fancy and complicated but it's actually incredibly simple!

To begin you will need a food processor and what ever kind of nuts you are using. If you want to roast the nuts ahead of time you will do this on a cookie sheet at 400 degrees for about ten minutes. We used around 3-4 cups of nuts for each batch and wound up with around 2 cups of paste. All you need to do now is place the nuts into a high powered food processor (your magic bullet will work too, but not as fast or well), and turn it on. You will find that at first you will have just nut dust, then it will start to clump and you will need to scrape the sides of the processor down, and finally it will liquify. This whole process is very noisy, so don't try to do this if you have family who is sleeping!

What you add to each batch will depend on the type of nut, and how oily it is by itself. For our almond butter we did not need to add any additional oil, it is just straight almonds. The peanut butter has. about 2 tablespoons of peanut oil and a half of a teaspoon of salt. The cashew butter has around 2 tablespoons of peanut oil and a bunch of cinnamon (to taste). You could also use vanilla, honey, sugar, or anything else. The dark chocolate peanut butter is of course the "worst" for you, but incredibly delicious. You begin by processing the peanuts to a liquid, then add half a cup of dark chocolate cocoa powder, one and a quarter cups of powdered sugar, three tablespoons peanut oil, and a quarter tablespoon salt to the processor and turn on until they are properly blended.

We bought the little jars at bed bath and beyond, we were looking for empty baby food jars which surprisingly Babies 'R Us does not sell. You could probably find small glass jars in a variety of stores.

The reviews are still out from our family but we had fun making them!