peanut butter and pillows

It was so cool this morning I actually turned on the heat for awhile.  Not that much different from most of the summer here, but the last few weeks we had a heat wave so it was kind of a shock for it to cool down so quickly.

The raspberry harvest has begun in earnest.  The everbearing raspberries seem to love cool weather after a heatwave and will be producing for at least the rest of the month I think.

I finally found the right pillow, so I splurged on them.  Feather pillows are the only kind I really find comfortable but my old feather pillows had started to smell musty and I know they say almost any kind of pillow is full of dust mites and other allergens after only a few months of use.  I've heard said you should buy new pillows every 6 months, but who can afford that?  But I know this musty smell and the dust mites and such are so bad for my lungs so I've been searching for a solution.
This pillow is filled with shredded latex, so it feels a lot like a feather pillow.  You can fluff it up and shape it how you want like a feather pillow.  It is a little "bouncier" though if you can understand what I mean by that and (a plus) it holds whatever shape you make of it all through the night and your head sinks in just enough but doesn't keep sinking in during the night like my old feather pillows did.  The covers are made of organic cotton and have a zipper, so if the cover needs washed you can dump the shredded latex into a bag, wash the cover and then reassemble.  The latex is naturally processed and has no odor at all, and since it can't host dust mites or mildew or any other allergens these pillows should last me for many many years.   I've used the pillows for several nights now and I am totally sold.  Plus I am waking up breathing easier too.  It's amazing what a difference the right pillow makes.

I bought this grinder awhile back but hadn't used it yet.  It's not a grinder that can make wheat flour (at least not without multiple grindings) but it is inexpensive and I got it to make my own nixtmatalized corn meal, which I haven't tried yet although I did buy the non-GMO dried corn and the lime I need to do it.  I also had the idea to grind my coffee with it.  I set it up today and tried that, and it worked great for that.  The only place I have to attach it right now is on my pull-out breadboard.  That worked for today but it was wobbly as the board shifted and it made gouges in the board, so I need to figure something else out.  I'd like to be able to set it up permanently, though that is going to be a challenge in my smallish kitchen.

While I had the grinder set up I decided to use it to make some nut butter according to the Nourishing Traditions recipe.  (I left out the honey because I didn't want it to be sweetened.)

First I ground a jar (a little over 1 quart) of crispy peanuts.  These are raw peanuts that have been soaked for 12ish hours in salt water and then dried for 24ish hours at 145*F in the food dryer.  The recipe said to use a food processor, which I don't own, but that it would make a dry meal which this did too.  It was really easy to use the grinder for the peanuts and didn't take very long.
I added 2 tsp of sea salt to this meal and stirred it in.

Next I added 1.5 cups of coconut oil.  Since I only have unrefined oil, it tastes like coconut. Since I wasn't using a food processor to mix, I had to do the next part by hand.  I started using a spatula and ended up just mixing it with my hand.  It was easy to incorporate the oil using my fingers to sort of knead it in.  It would have been a little easier yet if I had thought to get the oil out of the cool pantry ahead of time so that it would have softened first.  

Want a taste? :)

This nut butter has a different consistency.  Not really crunchy and not really creamy, as far as traditional storebought peanut butter comes.  (I buy Adams, which is just peanuts and salt so this is what I am comparing it to.  Not to crisco-added icky stuff like Jiff or something.  My apologies if you like that kind of peanut butter.  But really how could you?)   I could have set the grinder to a finer grind and this might have made it creamier.  Since I like crunchy peanut butter, I think it might be best to make a fine grind and then at the end add in some chopped peanuts.  It tastes good, although slightly like coconut.  

Some things I learned from making the recipe this first time:

1) I want to get some refined coconut oil (although I already knew that).

2) I think I will take up my mom's offer of borrowing her old Vitamix next time I am ready to make nut butter, in order to make a finer grind for a more traditional peanut butter texture.  (Although a Vitamix and/or a food processor would be handy I tend to really avoid owning a lot of small electrical appliances.  Several recipes I've tried lately have almost made me decide to buy a food processor though.)

3) This grinder is going to work great for making almond and filbert flour.  Grinding the peanuts basically into a peanut flour was easy and fast.  I will probably use it more often for that than I will for cornmeal.

4) The grinder grinds coffee just like I remember them doing it when I was in the mountains of Mexico during college.  Maybe I can figure some way to mount mine to a board attached to the wall under the window...

Ok, talking about Mexico made me nostalgic so I dug out some pictures and scanned them so I could share them here.  (They will get bigger if you click on them.)

Roasting coffee beans over a fire.

Grinding the coffee.  See, it looks just like my grinder, except theirs is red.

Isn't this absolutely the most fabulous outdoor kitchen you have ever seen?  I love my little indoor kitchen of course and I have more modern amenities, like a hot water heater, for which I am grateful.  But ever since I saw this place I have wished for an outdoor kitchen like this one too.  It was a great place to hang out and chat with the women-folk also.

Ah... people I will never see again, a place I will surely never be again.  Good memories...

Have a great week.  It's almost fall!