How to make peanut butter

I’m in 200% creation mode.
It’s amazing and exhausting.
All the ideas are filling my brain, I have notes everywhere, notes for Kitchen Saucery, ideas for future ebooks and products and just really cool things I’d love to make.

The energy it takes to be and stay in creation mode is huge. I probably shouldn’t aim for 200% creation mode – 50% is sufficient and possibly more effective.

But you know what happens when there’s so much going on in your head and you can’t get it out in time – things just swirl and take up your thinking capacity and your energy.

It’s like that to-do list at work, when you wake up in the middle of the night. Or walking into your house and seeing the pile of things at the front door, that just really need to be sorted out (and you wish they could be thrown out) but they’re necessary for one reason or another. It’s brain power to look at and to think about and to decided to doing nothing about (or make the plan to do it later)!

So the day ends and it’s time to make dinner and anything can seem too much effort. I’ve been trying to reduce what we buy, I have stock leftover from the LLL kitchen pantry and there’s no need to buy more. But the planning of knowing that the stock is there and integrating it into our kitchen pantry requires thinking.

So when you’re low on the energy and your cooking mojo is teetering on – let’s just order Ubereats and be done with it. Even the simplest of tasks can seem too hard. Like this easy peanut butter – we were running out, but I wanted to use the rice paper I had.

The vision was a nutty easy throw together sauce – a simpler version that didn’t require a blender or a mortar and pestle. It just required a tablespoon, a microplane and a bowl. To be honest, I tried to buy the nut butter – even though the peanut count is in the kilo’s in the LLL stock pile. I know. I know.

So I decided to just make something!
Which is such a huge part of Kitchen Saucery – just.make.something.

Make something you know you’ll eat.
Make something you know will make you feel good!
Make something you know will feed you more than once.
Make something that will help you get in the kitchen flow.
Make something difficult and learn.
Make something easy that doesn’t require a lot of effort.

It doesn’t actually matter what you make. It’s all in the DOING and the decision to feed yourself better food that your body will thank you for.

So the start of this recipe was out of me really wanting to experiment with peanut sauce for our rice paper rolls. But it turned into a mini photo shoot and now a blog post – which wasn’t the intention at all.

It’s funny how doing the things you don’t want to do can energise you back into your life, instead of lazing around on the couch, or inside the takeaway menu.

It can be as simple as making peanut butter. Or toasted sourdough croutons. Or a dressing. A dip. Sausage rolls. Roasted veggies.
It doesn’t need to be a risotto, or 8 hour baked lamb, or a crazy superfood mix with ingredients that cost $150 / kilo.

To eat better or to eat ‘healthy’ is to simply start with making something.

So I made something.

How to make peanut butter

Ingredients

• Minimum 3 cups peanuts

• Salt (to taste)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C.

2. Scatter peanuts on baking tray and bake for around 15 minutes.
   You want your peanuts to brown and toasted – not black and burnt. But you want a toasty flavour.

3. Transfer peanuts to your food processor / Thermomix and add salt. Start with 1/2 teaspoon, you can add more later.

4. Blend on high. As the nuts blend they will release their oils and break down to a smooth consistency. If you stop the blending too early, your nut butter will be dry. This took 2 minutes in my Thermomix on speed 7-9. I alternate between speed 7 and 9, as the mixture will get propelled out of the blades and up to the sides. I bring the speed down a bit to keep the processing happening and allow more oil from the nuts to be released.
   In a food processor, you may need to stop half way through and scrape the mixture back down into the blades.

5. Store in an airtight jar in your pantry or in the fridge.
   Eat wherever and whenever you feel nut butter is appropriate – which is always and anywhere.

Optional flavour boosters – cinnamon, coconut sugar, cacao powder / cocoa.You could also mix up the nuts too, cashew, brazil nut, almond, sesame seed, coconut.