The easiest most involved recipe you ever did read!

About six months ago, I was being fat and getting all comfy on my behind depression in the couch reading Yelp reviews of Chinese restaurants, when I had a momentous, shocking realization.

Somewhere between the time in my life when I refused to eat chicken outside my house because it could contain e. coli and the time in my life when I ordered, ate, and enjoyed a Taiwanese stir fly of tofu, bamboo shoots, and congealed duck blood, I had become an amateur foodie.

I can thank Dan for most of my palate development. We ate at a lot of restaurants in college, grad school, and beyond (and this may be the reason that my doughiness continues even to the present). We've eaten the good, the bad, and the ugly, and along the way, I've actually learned to recognize and appreciate good food.

"How's the fries?" Dan asks. "Natural-cut sea-salt, correct?"

"Sysco, unfortunately," I sigh.

I don't care what you call your fries and how fresh-cut and fancy you tell me they are. You can't pull the wool over my eyes. I know the taste of institutional food-service conglomerate fare better than you.

So now that we both have the liberty of being hip and trendy and turning our noses up at any restaurant we want (and, in Dan's case, can detail the pros and cons of said restaurants over on his uproariously funny Yelp account), I sometimes try to recreate some of the food that I've enjoyed at places where they charge you fifteen bucks for a tiny plate of tuna carpaccio. And that's, like, two and a half meals at McDonald's, not three, because inflation hurts us all.

Which means I have to find recipes, usually online.

Unless you're talking AllRecipes or the Food Network Online, finding a recipe for the perfect peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the Internet is truly the challenge of separating the wheat from the chaff. Because many recipes, many of the recipes I want to make, are buried deep on.... food blogs. Which is usually the code word for food photography blogs.

Now, I like pretty Pinterest food as much as any other white female between the ages of twenty-five and sixty. But when I'm just trying to find that perfect peanut butter and jelly recipe, I do not want to be wading through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of off-center photos of the perfectly-plated PBJ sandwich with a superfluous mason jar with a fancy straw somehow photobombing the poor sandwich. And yeah, when I get to the actual recipe, I am not grinding my own peanuts.

*****

Happy Weekend, everyone!

Lazy, lazy Saturday over in the Huang house today! Dan and I woke up around eleven and kind of lay around watching some Law and Order reruns. That big snowstorm that's supposed to come through finally started around noon, so we got to watch the snow fall out our big living room window. So cozy, I love it!

For lunch I decided to whip up this beauty of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!

Who doesn't love a real home-made PBJ? I remember when I was young, when we'd go out in the snow to play, my mom would make us all some hot cocoa and peanut butter and jelly when we came in. We'd sit down and eat while we played some board games. Great fun!

So yummy!

And yes, I finally got to put my peanut-grinder to work! It's such a great buy. Soooo easy to use, perfect peanut butter!

So without further ado, here's the recipe!

Grace's Best Most Awesome Most Not Labor-Intensive Ground Peanut Butter and Raspberry Jam Sandwich!

Ingredients

1/2 pound of organic peanuts, shelled

Natural loaf of bread (you can use your own, but I bought mine... Spelt! So yummy!)

1/2 pound fresh-picked raspberries

Cane sugar

Gelatin

1. Shell the peanuts.

2. Put shelled peanuts into peanut grinder. Pulse for ten seconds at a time. I had success when I pulsed for ten seconds and stopped for ten seconds. Fifteen minutes should about do it.

3. Peanuts should be a creamy consistency. Remove peanut butter from peanut grinder, set aside.

4. Wash and drain raspberries. Put raspberries into food processor, blend. Add sugar to taste. Add gelatin.

5. Put raspberry mixture into the fridge and let set for about an hour.

6. Spread butter and jelly on bread. Enjoy with a big glass of milk.

*****

So yeah, I'm bitter. All I want is a recipe that gives me the correct peanut butter/jelly proportions for a really good sandwich. I don't want to grind anything, saute crap, make a pate, or use a mason jar. Just no. No.