Ode to PB

   I found myself at the grocers again last night and as usual I had my standard line-up of goods: a 5-lb jar of peanut butter, some tuna fish, a few gallons of milk and three loaves of bread. The woman behind me in line yelled out "is that peanut butter?" when I hulked the massive jar onto the conveyor belt. I smiled and nodded as I imagined a week or two of sustenance in paste form.

    I love peanut butter. And that's not to say that I enjoy a PB & J every now and again. In fact, I try and refrain from adding jelly to the mix. For that matter, its not to often that I combine bread with my mound of molten peanut nectar: I'm kind of a food purist, I don't like my carbs mixing with my protein/fat.

    And its not just that I eat a lot of peanut butter, or eat it frequently (both of which are undeniably true). The fact is that the jar of peanut butter in my closet says "Hey . . . look at me . . . you don't have to worry about running out of food, I can sustain you for days with my legume-delicious-nutritiousness.

    I learned part of my peanut butter affinity from my mother, who was a stickler about serving sizes, and used to scoop exactly one tablespoon of peanut butter into her mouth for a quick meal if we were heading out the door. I do the same thing. Except, well I don't let myself be limited by the social constraint system known as the "serving size" nor the "2,000 calorie diet" (seriously, have you ever tried to eat less than 2,000 calories in a day? I'm pretty sure there are days when I come close to passing that benchmark before the 9-5 workday starts. Oh, and the other reason I don't eat spoonfuls of peanut butter is because spoons are a relative scarcity in my household these days. I've found you can wrap up a delicious nesting of the salted goo by spinning a fork in the vat a few times.

    There are days (like today as a matter of fact) that I consume nearly nothing but peanut butter. Okay, well, lets make that essentially nothing relative to the amount of peanut butter I consumed (I admit, I did have a pork chop sandwich at some point during the day, but all that protein hardly sticks to me).

   The reason I find peanut butter so irresistible is the same reason I drink a lot of water: it's readily available (at least at my home), relatively cheap, requires zero preparation, and has an awesome caloric density for when I know I need something but can't decide what (obviously that last tenant applies only to the peanut butter).