The main things that Joleen is supposed to avoid are peanut butter and sugar. So we started to look around for things that we could all use. We had already been using Sunbutter in the girls’ school lunches because we thought we needed to keep the lunches nut free. Sunbutter is a butter made from sunflower seeds. The second ingredient is sugar. It was out.
The next option was to look at kinds of butter made from tree nuts. The one that came to mind right away was almond butter. We looked at the almond butter available at our local grocery store. There were two jars there, one on the cheaper side from a national brand and an organic one that wasn’t so cheap. The cheaper option, of course, contained sugar. The organic tipped the scales at around a $1/oz.
I figured that could always make it by grinding up the whole nuts, but almonds aren’t the cheapest things in the world. That is when I stumbled on a recipe for using almond flour or meal. It is super simple and pretty quick.
It is 3 cups of almond flour, 4 Tbls of oil and a couple good pinches of salt. Combine that all in a blender or food processor and blend until smooth about 7 minutes. The oil that I was used was a liquid, favor neutral coconut oil. That is it. I couldn’t be more pleased with the way it turned out.
Do you have any peanut butter substitutes that you like? We would love to hear about them. Please leave us a comment.
Before you go I read a good book a couple years ago. Actually, it was an audiobook for Audible. Who has time to actually sit and read? So this book deals with the history of how our food has gotten to the state it is now. The how and why the big food companies vary the amounts of sugar, fats and salt in our food is explained in this book. I highly recommend it.
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