The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out

[venta]

For reasons which now escape me, at work yesterday we were talking about eating insects. Someone posted a link to this recipe, for "oatmealworm cookies", made with both oatmeal and mealworms. (NB That link goes to a blog about insect-eating, you have been warned).

It's a "no bake" cookie recipe, which basically involves glueing your dry ingredients together with butter, chocolate and peanut butter and then refrigerating[*]. I commented that I'd never met that style of biscuit recipe before, and was curious to try it.

Today, a colleague rolled in with some cookies made, he assures us, without mealworms. He swapped in chopped pecans instead. They're actually really nice - though I suspect they will devolve into goo very quickly if not kept in the fridge.

They are, however, leading me once again into the dangerous Peanut Butter Heresy. The PBH goes like this:

I like peanuts. I like satay sauce. I like peanut-butter cookies. I like the chicken dish my mum makes with peanut butter. I even like the ghastly Reese's peanut-butter cups. Therefore I must like peanut butter.

I am, right now, thinking that I should really give peanut butter another go, because surely I will like it.

In times like this it is important to remember: I have been down this route many, many times and I do not like the damn stuff. Despite all logic, it is improbably, unimaginably vile. Every time.

[*] No flour - it does have oatmeal in, but I imagine that could easily be swapped out for something else, so this sort of method might be an interesting route to gluten-free cookies.

Comments

[bockor.livejournal.com]

Неплохо

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

You might like my peanut-butter fudge recipe? No mealworms, but it has that amiable quality of peanut-butteriness without being peanut butter.

It's dead simple and doesn't need sugar thermometers and all that kind of stuff that trad fudge recipes call for.

(Unless you don't like fudge, of course.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ooh, sounds great! I love fudge, especially if it's the crumbly kind rather than the squodgy kind you get in tourist tat shops.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

It is crumbly to the max! (Especially if you leave the lid off.)

* Melt 125g butter (I like salted) in a pan, add 120ml semi-skimmed milk and 500g sugar (I like soft dark brown), stir.

* Bring to the boil and let it boil (without stirring) for 3 minutes.

* Take off the heat, stir in 250g crunchy peanut butter and the seeds from one vanilla pod (or a tsp of vanilla extract, I guess).

* Put 300g icing sugar in a large bowl, and pour/scrape in the hot mixture. Beat it all together with a wooden spoon until smooth and uniform. (Bonus points if you manage to do this without shooting great puffs of icing sugar all over the place.)

* Line a sided baking tray or similar (I use a lasagne dish) with baking paper, pour in the mixture, and smooth it down into a flat layer. Let it cool to room temp then pop in the fridge to chill. Cut into cubes (you should get 120 or so) and you can keep it in a sealed box for… dunno how long, but probably quite a while. It'll get eaten much sooner than that, anyway.

[venta.livejournal.com]

That sounds most excellent, thank you! I shall try it when I next have the opportunity (ie a bunch of people to make fudge for... ChrisC is a nut-free environment and, while I'm sure I can eat 120 cubes of fudge myself, I probably shouldn't).

(I will not be putting myself forward for bonus points. I am a most terribly messy cook.)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm – although theoretically possible to eat the whole batch without anyone else's help, it is basically the thick end of a bag of sugar…

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

Oooh, thankyou

[venta.livejournal.com]

They're actually really nice

They're also, it turns out, something you can easily have too many of. In this case, two.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Not that I'm trying to tempt you into unwisely trying peanut butter here, but it really is no one substance.

The stuff I like - Whole Earth Original Crunchy - is a lot like what you'd get if you challenged someone to embed as many chopped nuts as possible into a lump of modelling clay. That is: extremely sticky, impossibly viscous and... erm... full of nuts. Then at the other end of the spectrum you get the far cheaper "smooth" peanut butters which have the consistency of cream cheese and so much sugar in them that they taste like desserts.

In most supermarkets it's possible to get a range of stuff in between the two extremes and with varying degrees of oiliness and saltiness (varying from "quite" to "very very" of course).

And that's before you start messing with the dark arts of mixing peanut butter and chocolate spread in various proportions...

tl;dr - Liking peanut butter is a complicated business. Best leave it to the experts. ;-)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Re: sticky and viscous. Someone once offered me some (organic, worthy) cashew nut butter on an oatcake. I figured I like cashews, I'd like it, right?

Not only was it nasty, I had to pretty much physically scrape it off the roof of my mouth :(

I suspect I have mostly tried things along the Sunpat Crunchy lines, which are probably about in the middle of your spectrum. Perhaps I should try a range to check... or perhaps I should just not, and stick to letting other people buy it and make it into gooey chocolate cookies for me :)

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

What you need is not Reese's peanut-butter cups. Try Reese's Pieces instead. If you don't like them, let me know and I will find a way to refund you.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Why don't I need peanut-butter cups? I mean, apart from the fact they're ridiculously expensive in this country and horrifically bad for me?

Google tells me Reese's Pieces are like Smarties but with a peanut butter middle, which sounds interesting. If I encounter some on my travels I'll try them.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Reese's Pieces are great. As are peanut butter M&Ms, which you can only get in America.

[ceb.livejournal.com]

Everything made of peanut butter is nice. Peanut butter is horrible. You don't need to check :-)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Do you have an opinion on the flavor of almonds, in particular, as compared to flavor of things that are said to taste of almonds?

[venta.livejournal.com]

They're both nice, but quite different. Like banana and banana flavour, or real coffee and instant coffee.

Almond-flavoured things are often very sweet, which makes a big difference (though possibly the same difference as I see with peanuts and peanut buter).

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Just imagine what it will be like to find you still hate peanut butter, and then find the jar a year later with one knife-ful taken out of it, going mouldy in the cupboard, and then have to scrape the mouldy gunk out of the jar and wash the jar up with all those bits of gunky horribleness floating in the water.

If you are one of these despicable people who throws out glass jars into landfill instead of recycling them if they have even mildly unpleasant things in, do not tell me. Let me keep my illusion of respect.

[venta.livejournal.com]

No, I don't throw out glass jars :) Where I live at the moment I can't recycle plastic tubs (bottles yes, tubs no, even if they're made from the same type of plastic - no, I don't understand it either).

I already have a minor army of plastic tubs to use as fridge boxes, so I'm reduced to throwing them out which seems bad enough :(

If I buy peanut butter to try it (unlikely, admittedly) and find it's still disgusting I shall make it into lovely peanut butter cookies instead of having to do the mouldy washing-up dance in another twelve months.

[motodraconis.livejournal.com]

I've spent the majority of my life utterly loathing peanut butter, including many of the same reasons you've described, which I utterly understand.

Then 2 years ago I had to buy some in order to trap vermin. This coincided with me being so short of cash I had to eat anything I could find in my cupboards (admittedly, this is a regular occurrence.) This could have entailed peanut butter and/or the trapped vermin, but the peanut butter won. I sort of don't mind it now. I don't love it, but I now keep a pot in the cupboard as emergency spreadable on breadable rations to eat when there is nothing else available. (Being as I don't care for sweet spreads.)

So ah, in times of desperation, one can build an immunity to the horror, and it sort of can grow on you.

Whether it's worth the hassle for you to build an immunity is another matter!

[venta.livejournal.com]

I think my emergency spreadable savoury requirements are already well-covered by Marmite, so don't feel I really have a peanut-butter shaped hole in my life. Nice to know that the loathing can be overcome if necessary, though!

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

But - even if you don't like peanut butter, you can use it to make your own satay sauce (definitely involves lime juice. Can't recall other ingredients - instinct tells me some nice finely diced mild red chillies would be nice, and maybe a tiny bit of palm sugar depending on sweetness of peanut butter...)

[venta.livejournal.com]

You can use it to make all sorts of lovely things, but doing so doesn't seem to be built into my cookery regime at present :)