Happy National Peanut Butter Month

There’s a lot of food on the site today, but I’ll go all-in instead of all-out (?). Anyway, I recently learned that it’s National Peanut Butter Month, so I asked colleagues a few questions about what it means to them. (Also, here is a guide to spreadable nuts.)

EZ: Have you been celebrating? I have, without realizing it. I feel like peanut butter has been in the news a lot recently, with that divisive peanut-butter-and-pickles sandwich recipe in the Times, and the Trader Joe’s PB recall. And then with the typical Reese’s stuff at Halloween.

Do you guys refrigerate your fancy peanut butter? Because I got this snazzy unsalted stuff from a place that makes it on a machine right in front of you, and I didn’t ever refrigerate it, and it was great. But then my (salted) TJ’s PB says to refrigerate it, so I do, and it’s also great.

Speaking of TJ’s PB, it always cracks me up to see “Contains peanuts” on the back of the label. I feel like somehow that speaks to a larger thing about this day and age or something.

Mike Dang: I only eat Jif? My mom was choosy. Also, I don’t refrigerate it. Should I?

Jane Marie: I had a peanut butter ice cream sandwich at Umami Burger the other day and it didn’t taste like peanut butter even a little bit.

Logan Sachon: My college roommates were really healthy. Not because of trying to be fit or anything, but because they grew up in houses where, like, rice cakes were dessert? Our apartment kitchen always had huge jars of natural peanut butter, which everyone would eat with a spoon as a taste treat. Like, for dessert. A bunch of college girls eating peanut butter with upside-down spoons and moans of satisfaction like in yogurt commercials. I kept the habit of eating peanut butter out of a jar, but I do it for meals, and have slowly replaced peanut butter with Nutella, which is also a nut butter, kind of.

Alex Balk: I am firmly in the “do not refrigerate” camp. Also I prefer almond butter.

Adam Frucci: The ice cream place a block from me used to make an ice cream called PB Fluff n Stuff, and it was the greatest ice cream ever made. Peanut butter ice cream with swirls of marshmallow fluff and chunks of peanut butter sandwich cookies. But apparently working fluff into ice cream is really hard, so they stopped making it. This is a cold, brutal world we live in.

***

No doubt, Adam! When I worked at an ice cream store, it was the chocolate that was hard to scoop. My cones would be like these little stacks of chips and slivers. Anyway, the email thread moved briefy into the great cashews are evil “debate” (although I actually didn’t know that they start to rot on the tree, that’s disgusting), and then I went out and bought sunflower, peanut, and almond butters, and ate them all separately and then mixed together. TJ’s didn’t have cashew butter, though, and I read somewhere that it costs as much as $20 in some (non-TJs) stores. What!

So, a recipe for Spreadable Nuts in General, although I guess sunflower seeds aren’t nuts. NOTE: Contains peanuts!!!!

– 1 unit almond butter
 — 1 unit peanut butter
(try these two together first, see if you like them, then…)
 — 1 unit sunflower seed butter

To be honest, I’ve actually eaten too much peanut butter in the past week, partially because I ran out of food and was eating it from the container all day, so the idea of eating it right now makes me want to throw up.

Elsewhere: A History of Meals.