Peanut Butter and Everything

What were your favorite snacks when you were a kid? Here are a few of mine!

Peanut butter and apples. I’m the crazy kid who can eat peanut butter straight out of the jar. My mom would be horrified if she found out. (Oh wait…my mom reads this blog. Hi, Mom!) To keep me from eating the whole jar in one sitting, I slice apples into eighths, take out the seeds, and then I slather peanut butter in that little space where the seeds were.

Graham crackers. These are expensive here in Japan, and I haven’t learned to make them yet. But if you can find or make them, graham crackers plain are just fine dunked in a glass of milk of your choice. These are also just fine when you take a square of graham cracker, spread peanut butter or cream cheese on it, and make a sort of sandwich by placing another square of graham cracker on top. Do you have raisins? Add them, because they make the whole snack all the more exciting!

Ants on a log. Celery doesn’t excite me. Peanut butter, again, does excite me. Celery and peanut butter and raisins together – exciting just like the graham cracker snack above! Take a stalk of celery, and clean it well. Tear off the leaves (save them for a soup!), and trim the edge of the stalk at the white end. Spread peanut butter in the hollow of the celery stalk to make the log. For the ants, put raisins along the top. Try cream cheese or hummus for a terrific variation instead of peanut butter. Crunch away!

Cinnamon sugar. This isn’t a snack, no, but you’ll want to have a jar of it in your kitchen all the time. Find a baby food jar or a small plastic container and find the lid that matches it. Pour in two parts sugar to one part cinnamon. Close the container tightly and shake shake shake shake shake (five times). Done. Sprinkle on French toast, on pancakes, on muffins just before baking, on oatmeal after it is cooked, on warm or cold applesauce, on fresh bread just before baking, on waffles, on chunks of raw apple, on chunks of raw apple and peanut butter, in your hot cocoa, on tofu….