Ersatz peanut butter

I’m afraid my Belarusian readers are scratching their heads over the title of this post. Ersatz means “artificial” or “substitute,” and we understand that it’s not likely to be as good as the original.

I had some real peanut butter here earlier on this trip. First I managed to buy some Polish peanut butter at the central supermarket, and then I received a jar from Europe as a gift from our friend Elena. When that ran out, I started looking to buy more, but never managed to find anything besides some weird-looking white stuff from China. I didn’t buy the Chinese peanut butter, and as a result I have not had peanut butter of any kind for a couple of months.

Feeling severely starved for a favorite food, I tried to make some of my own. I bought a bag of peanuts and ran some of them our meat grinder several times. The first time was the hardest. The whole peanuts were too hard for the not-so-sharp teeth on our old Soviet meat grinder and I had to keep reversing and pushing forward just a fraction of a turn with each effort. The output resembled fine sand.

I ran my sandy peanut crumbs back through the meat grinder numerous times. Each time it got marginally finer, but the level of improvement with each pass got pretty hard to detect. I finally became bored and ran out of time when I had a cupful of slightly-sticky peanut dust. If I had a food processor, I could have converted this dust to peanut butter in moments, but I gave up and stirred in a tablespoon of honey to hold the crumbs together.

Honestly, the Chinese peanut butter probably would have been better. And cleaning up the meat grinder proved to be a bigger nuisance than I expected. I think I’ll regard this as a learning experience that I don’t need to repeat.