Have I told you how to make peanut butter?

I keep meaning to post about my adventure in peanut butter making! A few months ago EnviRambo blew my mind when she posted about making your own brown sugar. I had never even stopped to think about how brown sugar was made or where it came from, so hearing how easy it is to make shocked and inspired me.

I've tried making a few other things from scratch since then, including peanut butter, which was quite simple as well. It's easy enough to find natural, organic, no-junk-added peanut butters at the supermarket, but almost all of them come in plastic containers which irks me to no end.

A few weeks ago I stumbled across a recipe for peanut butter accidentally and thought I'd give it a whirl. I bought some organic, dry roasted peanuts (no salt) and was all set - yep, that easy!

I've found that I often get too excited to be bothered with things like precision and measuring, but "we're not building a piano" as my father-in-law used to say, so you can use your own good judgment.

I put a few hands full (hand fulls?) of peanuts into my food processor and drizzled a tiny bit of canola oil on top. (Maybe a tablespoon to start with, then add 1T more if necessary.) The recipe called for peanut oil, but I found it to be pretty expensive and I didn't want to spend $10 on it if this wasn't going to turn out well. The canola oil did the job and I always have it on hand so...

Turn the food processor on and let it work its magic! First it looks like quinoa, then it starts to clump together.


Eventually it becomes one big ball in the food processor, then finally spreads out and becomes creamy (and warm - be sure to eat some right then!).

I store mine in a glass container in the fridge. There's nothing more satisfying that making a PB&J sandwich with homemade peanut butter and the jelly I canned over the summer. Look at me getting all Little House on the Prairie!

I know it may be a silly, smug type of satisfaction but I CAN MAKE FOOD! Food that most people I know buy at the store. The ingredients haven't been grown with chemicals, picked, shipped somewhere, altered, added to, processed by heavy machinery, packaged in plastic (which was made from petroleum, formed into a jar using heavy machinery, shipped to the food processing plant) then shipped to a distributor, then driven across the country to a supermarket.

I knew I loved peanut butter, but I never knew all that happiness and satisfaction could come in such a little homemade jar of it!