“If you get right/down to it the new/unprocessed peanut/butter is no damn/good & you should/buy it in a jar as/always in the/largest supermarket/you know” —Eileen Myles, Peanut Butter, Poetry Foundation.
What happens when you’re done purchasing a jar of peanut butter? Do you spread it on a piece of bread? No! That’s what everybody does. And it’s not even the healthiest way to eat peanut butter.
Here’s what you can do instead, that’s also easy (I’m learning too!):
Add peanut butter to yogurt
Swirl peanut butter into yogurt, add some honey along the way. Or make a nutty smoothie, packed with the goodness of oats, bananas, cinnamon, and almond milk or yogurt. Speaking of oats, yet another alternative is to blend peanut butter into your cooked or overnight oats and have it for breakfast.
Use peanut butter when making popcorn
Choose peanut butter instead of butter when popping those kernels. This recipe will have you make a peanut butter caramel sauce that you add to cooked popcorn.
Enjoy peanut butter with bananas, apples, or celery
By far the easiest and healthiest method of eating peanut butter is by coring and slicing an apple or pear and then spreading peanut butter on it. If you make your own natural peanut butter, you can determine its texture, so why not make one whose texture permits you to dip your fruits in, instead of having to spread it onto fruits? Some folks even insist on stuffing cored apples with peanut butter and, wait for it—Reese’s peanut butter pieces. One can’t get enough of it!
Make sauces for marinades or noodles or anything savory
There’s pad thai and satay, which means peanuts can in fact be deliciously incorporated into savory dishes. Interestingly, online recipes for savory dishes that involve peanut butter are also mostly Asian-inspired—like peanut sesame noodles and crispy tofu cauliflower rice stir fry. Otherwise, simply fix a peanut butter marinade by combining peanut butter with ingredients such as soy sauce, lemon juice, garlic, pepper flakes, and some water and sugar (some even add ginger).
Mix peanut butter into your vegetable repertoire
Prepare a simple peanut dressing as an accompaniment to your salad by adding just soy sauce, sugar, black pepper, and rice vinegar (you most likely already have these in your kitchen, right?) to peanut butter. A more elaborate Thai peanut sauce calls for additional ingredients such as garlic, chili garlic sauce, grated ginger root, lime juice, and a few cloves of garlic. You can also try out more elaborate vegetable recipes to step up your peanut-butter-vegetable-dish repertoire: how about a Thai-inspired peanut quinoa salad, or paneer veggies in peanut sauce?
Make no-bake sweet-afters
Dessert doesn’t only mean peanut butter cookies. It can also mean healthy no-bake chocolate peanut butter cookies (oats, shredded coconut, cocoa powder, instead of white flour) or peanut butter & banana wraps.
In a nutshell
Almost half of the peanuts produced in America gets made into peanut butter (according to The American Peanut Council) and Galantis’ music video for their song Peanut Butter Jelly proves the point that peanut butter has a lot to do with joy and pleasure, at least in the United States. What better way to celebrate the most nutritious, economical, and lovable spread than to enjoy it in nourishing and convenient ways?
