Peanut Butter Kick

Apparently I'm on a HUGE peanut butter kick. I have been eating it every day. It's amazing I haven't gained a million pounds. I don't recommend this diet by any means, however, if you are looking to put a little peanut butter into your diet in some interesting ways, I have some recipes to share!

All of these recipes are made using my grains from my grain share, in case you were wondering (I know you were).

"1927 PB Bread"
from "As the Mill Wheel Turns: Tasty, Traditional Biscuits & Breads" by Patricia B. Mitchell (I picked this up in Lexington, MA at one of the historic homes gift shop).


Yeah, that's peanut butter in bread. Yes, it's as amazing as it sounds. It makes an awesome breakfast bread. The milk adds makes it taste creamy, like eating a peanut butter cookie with milk all in a bread. I didn't even put anything on it, but my housemate tried it with jelly and reported it was worth doing.

2 cups whole wheat flour
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt (I omitted this since my PB is salted)
1/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup peanut butter (I used chunky which gave it some interesting texture)
1 2/3 cup milk

Mix the dry ingredients. In a different bowl combine thoroughly the remaining ingredients. Stir together the two mixtures. Spoon into a loaf pan, the inside bottom of which has been greased, and bake at 350F for around 45 minutes, or until firm (a knife inserted doesn't really ever come out clean because of the PB).

This bread does get a little dry and crumbly (at least it did for me) the longer it sits.

Chunky Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

1.5 cups all-purpose flour (this was not from my farm share)
1/4 cup oats (this was!)
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt (again, I didn't include this because of my salted PB)
8 oz (1 cup) chunky peanut butter
6 fl ounces mild honey
4 ounces unsalted butter (at room temperature)
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 large egg
1 Tbsp. vanilla
6 ounces semi or bitter sweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350F.
Mix 1st 4 ingredients in a medium bowl. Set aside.
Beat PB, honey, butter, sugar, egg, and vanilla in large bowl until well blended.
Add dry ingredients into PB mixture and beat on low speed until well blended
Add in chocolate chips and mix.
Portion out cookie dough 3 inches apart onto parchment lined or buttered cookie sheet.
Bake for 12-15 minutes until tops are golden brown.

These are the moisest, most delicious PB chocolate chip cookies you will ever find. I think I'll try using my whole wheat next time. They were gone in no time.

Finally, there's this: from my own recipe arsenal:

Peanut Butter and Raspberry Hot Cereal
This is my go-to breakfast these days

1/2 cup flaked wheat berries
1 cup of milk and/or water (or any combination of the two, milk substitutes also work fine)

Cook these on high in the microwave in an individual-sized bowl for 4 minutes. Since all microwaves are a little different, I would suggest keeping an eye on it the first time to make sure it doesn't boil over because who wants to clean up the microwave first thing in the morning? It the oats are too chewy/hard for you, cook it a little longer.

After it's cooked, add about 1-2 Tbsp (or whatever you want) of chunky peanut butter, raspberries/blueberries/whatever fruit is in season or in your freezer, honey/maple syrup (to taste), chia seeds, nuts, raisins, whatever else you want! It's super fun to play around with ingredients. I recently made some applesauce and added that along with my peanut butter instead of raspberries and it was Amazing. My housemate adds an entire chopped apple to the grain before she puts it in the microwave along with some cinnamon. Unsweetened cocoa powder along with some honey or brown sugar and your favorite nuts is a great dessert-like way to enjoy these grains.

Yeah, I think that about covers all the PB-related things I've been eating. I've been eating more grains in the last few weeks than I have in the last couple months I think. Some of those recipes will be up here shortly...

First Grain Share Pick-Up

As you could probably gather from the title, today was the first pick-up for my grain share. 40 pounds of grains to be exact (this is less than half of the total ~150 lbs I will be getting!). 30 pounds of wheat and 10 pounds of spelt. If anyone knows of any good recipes using spelt, I'd be happy to hear them. Spell check doesn't even recognize the word and I have certainly never used it before! I hear it makes good pizza dough though, I guess I'll have to give that a try. I also need to buy a flour mill. Like this one that I used today:

Well, you can't see much from that view and apparently I neglected to get a better shot of it. But it is a small, relatively quiet table top mill. The grain all aligned itself to march down into the flaker. Take that entropy!

When the grain came out of the flaker it looked like this:

Flour on left, flaked wheat on right.

The flour is to the left, the flakes on the right. The small flaker machine also grinds flour, but since there were so many of us there to grind some of our flour we used this beast:

It was totally bad-ass. It's on/off switch was pulling the power cord out of the outlet. It worked great but I'm pretty sure my housemates wouldn't be okay with one of them in our kitchen. Sad.

We also took a little tour of the farm in the form of a tractor-pulled hay ride. It was out in Western MA and it was a beautiful day so we lucked out.

Farmer Adam driving the tractor

I am not entirely sure what I'm in for now that I have all of this grain. I hope I'm not in over my head with this one. It seems like a good idea in theory....

While we were out in Western MA, I also stopped in at my FAVORITE bar ever/The Greatest Place on Earth and had a couple beers.

The Moan and Dove aka Heaven

This place has not changed at all since I was in school and visiting this place on weekends (and maybe a couple weekdays). I have so many great memories here. I wish I lived closer!!

OK, the art has changed.

All in all, pretty much a perfect Sunday. I don't think I would have changed a single thing.

This also happened this weekend:

Grape jam

I spent pretty much my entire Saturday afternoon making grape jam, and I only got these 4 little jars out of all that work. I am pretty sure I will never do that again.

It started with picking the grapes off of my old house's grape vine. This involved a ladder and a good amount of time in and of itself. Next you have to separate the skins from the pulp. This took a tremendous amount of time as well. I mean, just think about it: "Skinning grapes", it pretty much sounds like a torture method.

Skinning grapes: hours of my life I'll never get back.

Then I had to cook the pulp and skins, strain out the seeds, combine the pulp and skins and cook down until it runs off a spoon in sheets. This means that the jam will set properly and not just be juice. I'm not sure mine would have ever gotten to that stage because I'm pretty sure I didn't have enough unripe fruit (which contains more pectin, the stuff that makes it gel) to properly set my jam. I also didn't have any pectin so I called it good after about an hour and a half or so. Meanwhile, I was preparing the cans and lids. Then spooning it into the jars and boiling them for 10 minutes.The jam I scraped out of the pan with a spoon is super tasty, but these days you can buy great jam at the store/farmer's market that won't take an entire day out of your life.

Jam boiling away my Saturday!

Good weekend, looking forward to using my flour and flakes in something awesome this week!