Nutrition

Coming under the heading of "housewifery training", I helped make peanut butter today. Yes, from real peanuts.
First we shelled them all, then we soaked them overnight in salt water. The soaking neutralises the phytic acid and the enzyme inhibitors so that our bodies can access all of the peanutty nutrients. Then we drained them (no rinsing!) and put them in a crock pot* on "keep warm" for a long time. Perhaps about 36 hours. We then mashed them up with a potato masher and ground them up the rest of the way with a blender.** Before we put the peanuts in the blender, we blended together about 1/2 c. coconut milk and 1/2 c. peanut oil. Then we added the peanuts one scoop at a time. They took about ten minutes to grind up. We added some honey, molasses, and a pinch or two of salt to flavour it. After the ten minutes were up, we had some very creamy real peanut butter! It is so tasty, and much better for us than that nasty stuff from the grocery store.

*The recipe calls for drying out in a low-temperature oven for about that long, but we use that oven for other things, so we figured we'd try the crock pot instead. It worked wonderfully.

**We dont have a food processor, or else we would have used that instead.