Chocolate and Peanut Butter
Love, Obsession, or Necessity?
There are so many good things to say about chocolate that I almost don’t know where to start. It is such a comfort food that when I’m extremely stressed I’ll carry some around with me—and not eat it—just to have some at hand; and Maximus especially is developing a taste for finer dark chocolate. About once a month Nick likes to get me a decently priced bar of fancy dark chocolate, most of the time with orange and almonds. I like to eat it slowly and make it last (I also prefer to limit how many sweets and luxury foods I eat), but Max asks for a piece of it every other day. And all of the kids love to put chocolate chips on almost everything—if they won’t eat offering to put chocolate chips on it is a sure way of getting them to eat something.
And then there’s the peanut butter. I don’t know how we would live without it. The kids are such picky eaters, and I’ve had enough trouble eating while pregnant, that we’ve come to depend on peanut butter for high calorie good fats and protein. I add peanut butter to everything that I can.
The natural thing to do next was to combine the two in a way that the kids weren’t used to. We’ve done so many combinations of chocolate and peanut butter, but we haven’t tried them melted. And Nutella is so expensive, it seemed like that was what I should try to make.
I filled up some jars half way with peanut butter, the rest of the way with chocolate chips, about two teaspoons of oil (we were given avocado oil and I like using it), and a few drops of vanilla flavoring. Then I melted everything in the microwave—about a minute on high. Finally I stirred it as best I could with a butter knife. I had to add more chocolate chips after stirring it because the volume went down, but everything is better with more chocolate.
The taste of peanut butter is still very heavy, but I’m reluctant to cut back the amount because of all the protein and stuff. But I’ll do that one day. In the meantime the kids like it the way it is, and they put it on everything.
It’s not so great in coffee because it’s very thick; I’ve got other things to put in my coffee anyway. One jar of peanut butter and one bag of chocolate chips makes two mason jars full. We get enough peanut butter from the food pantry, and my mom likes to give us oil and vanilla, so the only thing I have to buy is the chocolate chips. That means I can get twice the amount of chocolate nut butter for the same price as the expensive stuff. Yay! Maximus has requested that I get dark chocolate chips next time and that will probably be when I cut back on the peanut butter. Although dark chocolate is more finicky so I’ll have to play with it some.
