We are all quite proud of my daughter, Jess, who works in advertising in New York City. She’s 24, broke, and works on the top floor of a Fifth Avenue sky scraper right next to the Empire State Building.
And she does cool work. Her firm, Green Team, focuses on what they call the “Awakening Consumer,” and they help folks work sustainability into their products and branding.
I’ve written about Jess’s energy footprint before, but her relationship to local food is another matter all together. On her trip home she passes the legendary farmer’s market at Union Square, and more hip, excellent, foodie-focused establishments than we have in our entire region.
But she has the problem of no money. We spent some time together in Chicago and Toronto over the holidays, and I was shocked to learn that she totes a peanut butter sandwich to work every day for lunch.
So for her birthday last week I decided to make her some peanut butter. I went by the garage on Thompson Street where Farmer Doug had stashed a ton of peanuts-still on the vine-and I shoved them in the Jetta and took them to the plant.
A hatchback load of biomass was reduced to a bucket of peanuts, which I then shelled by hand. A bucket full became a bowl. Which I then roasted on a cookie sheet. I was called away just as the peanuts were coming out of the oven, when Carol stopped by. Carol and I have been working on strengthening our foodshed recently, and have been writing about it over at Sustainable Grub.
None of us had ever made peanut butter before, and the technical aspects of doing so were swirling about the plant kitchen. My theory was that you throw the nuts in the blender and you call it a day. Doug and Greg felt that a blender was incapable of releasing the oil from the cell walls of the nut and that another machine would be required.
Carol had a “Vitamix” at her place-which is apparently some sort of juicer. Mightier than a blender perhaps?
By then I was out of the conversation. I simply tried to bring the focus back to Jess, who, to my horror, is living on commodity peanut butter for lunch.
Carol took the peanuts home and transformed her kitchen into a food lab. The blender made a thick oil-less meal, to which she added a shot of canola oil, and the Vitamix turned it into a wonderful soft swirling goo. One batch was too runny. One batch was too thick. She blended them together and came out with an offering for Jess that was just right.
Apparently she went through some other hoops too. She skinned some the nuts, and re-roasted, and basically played for hours on perfecting peanut butter.
I filled a small Tupperware dish with hand made peanut butter and sent it to Jess, and another one circulated around Piedmont Biofuels. Whenever we have a new food breakthrough I tend to walk about with a spoon, or a fork, or a knife, distributing tastes to everyone I bump into. Some might recall our “Banana Communion,” in which many people received a single slice of a locally grown banana.
Homemade peanut butter transported Tami back to her childhood. Her father used to make it for her in Raleigh. So she went to work making a batch. In our most recent violation of child labor laws, she deployed kids in the harvesting of the raw nuts.
And she went the “crunchy” route, using peanut oil and honey to increase lubricity.
Her honey infused crunchy peanut butter is like the food of the gods. Not as spreadable, but exquisite off the spoon. She took a large container to her Dad to celebrate his birthday.
Apparently Jess passed samples around Green Team, and apparently our home grown, hand made peanut butter is now the rage on the top floor of a Fifth Avenue advertising firm. There has long been a suspicion amongst her colleagues that her father is a nutjob.
I try not to worry about that. Rather, I like to speculate on the next logical step. Clearly we need to drive toward “peanut butter self sufficiency.” Naturally Doug has selected the best seeds and set them aside to preserve favorable genetics.
I’m currently thinking of where I can deploy a large enough rabbit-free area to take off a decent peanut crop next year…
