Ode to the Nut Butter: A Nut Butter Nut

I now fancy myself a bit of a “nut butter connoisseur” you might say. It all starts with peanut butter as a kid and for the first 27 years of my life that was pretty much the only nut butter known. Now I’ve pretty much got an entire shelf in my fridge and cupboard devoted to nut butters! I can’t get enough of them! There are worse things in this world to have an addiction to, no? Although calorie dense, nut butters are pretty much all incredibly good for you. The only downfall to them is that one tablespoon is never enough!

So I decided to do a post dedicated to my nut butters!

Growing up there was no “natural” option for peanut butter and we all slathered our arteries with hydrogenated oils. Those kinds of peanut butters not only had trans fats, but were loaded with added sugar and salt. Knowing what we know now about that stuff, I am glad that my kids won’t be growing up eating that junk! Hubby is still a peanut butter lover and I’m pretty sure he’ll never cross over into the other nut butter worlds with me, so recently I noticed that the Sobeys had a Compliments brand of natural peanut butter and they had crunchy which is hubby’s favourite so I picked up a jar (for only $2.99 btw) for him to try hoping that he won’t mind that it’s not laden with sugar and salt. He has yet to try it, but I’m anxious to find out what he thinks.

This is now what I refer to as my “old faithful” of the nut butters, almond butter. You might be surprised that it’s not the peanut variety given that it was the “only” kind for most of my life, but after peanut butter I only had eyes spoons for almond butter and I’ve even upgraded to getting the Costco size which doesn’t really last all that long in my house:

Without fail I would have a spoonful of this yumminess along side my oatmeal. This stuff never stays on the spoon in a hot bowl of oatmeal though because it would melt into a delicious pool along the top:

Tip: with any natural nut butters, the oil tends to separate and rise to the top. If you give it a bit of a stir and store it in the fridge upside down, you won’t ever have that problem again!

And what goes better with peanut butter than chocolate, right??! Look what I came across one day at Planet Organic! It’s Peanut Butter & Co. Dark Chocolate Dreams.

That’s right people it’s actual peanut butter and chocolate! (I recently spotted a peanut butter and white chocolate flavour of this at Pete’s Frootique btw).

Judging from their website they have a whole SLEW of interesting peanut butter combos! Keep them coming here people!

My favourite way to eat this kind is smacked in the middle of a banana sammich!

Peanut butter +banana = YUM

Peanut butter +chocolate = YUM

Peanut butter + banana + chocolate = YUM squared :-D

And yesterday while perusing Pete’s Frootique, I stopped in my tracks when I saw this:

I had to try it right away and a swoop of the finger in the jar confirmed my suspicions. It’s awesome and I love it :-) I had on my spoon in my oatmeal this morning and it actually stays on the spoon and doesn’t melt into a puddle:

Absolutely perfect compliment to this bowl of oatmeal because I always put a ton of cinnamon in my oatmeal anyway! That and of course, all the other amazing toppings that totally make the bowl of oats!

There were no raisins at the top at all, but when I looked at the bottom of the jar you can see them in there:

It’s funny because I grew up hating raisins. Now I actually like them alot! I can hardly wait to try this on a toasted Ezekiel cinnamon raisin english muffin! It’ll be perfection!

And how could I not include my BFF PB2!! We all know that I just adore this stuff! THIS is the exception to the “con” that nut butters are calorie dense and the fact that one tablespoon is never enough for the amount of calories that you get.

You get two tablespoons of this (dry) for about 50 calories and another pro to this stuff is that when you constitute it with water, you can make it the consistency you want and you can stretch it as far as you want too. It makes great “dips” for apple slices or celery or whatever else you like with peanut butter. And the Chocolate PB2 makes an amazing dip for fresh strawberries btw! I love drizzling the chocolate over top of my oatmeal before adding my other toppings = DIVINE. If you’re into protein shakes, this stuff is THE KEY INGREDIENT into making an amazing shake. Mix it in your yogurt too…the possibilities are endless because it’s consistency is up to you.

Now I will not lie, this variety does not compare to the lip smacking quality you get with the real “full fat” nut butter, but that is the trade off – do you want to save calories or do you want the fat in it?

Then there’s coconut butter. This just became available at the Planet Organic here in Halifax and I am a huge fan of the Artisana Raw Organic Nut butters.

The downside is that this was incredibly expensive, but I simply had to try it! I was imagining it on my oatmeal and on top of my yogurt combos and before I knew it, it was in my cart and I was at the check out!

The best way I’ve found to work with this is to use a tiny fork and to scrape it from the jar. That way you can little shaving type crumbles of it instead of one hard lump. When you first scoop it, it’s not as creamy as other nut butters, but it melts into little soft creamy blobs on warm oatmeal:

Here it is in a yogurt combo on top. Because it was cold, it stayed fairly hard, but still oh soooooo goood because it melts in your mouth:

And the little sister to this brand of coconut butter is the Amazon Bliss variety which is AWESOME! I did a product review of it a little while ago here. It consists of: Artisana Raw Organic Coconut Butter, Organic Extra Virgin Coconut Oil, Organic Acai, Organic Yacon, Organic Cacao Nibs, Organic Goji Berries, Organic Agave Syrup.

It’s great over oatmeal and has just an amazing flavour (as you can imagine based on the ingredients):

….and over yogurt combos too:

And then there was the lonely little yucky SoyNut Butter. Don’t buy this….ewwwwwwww….I don’t know what I was thinking! I must have been in a nut butter stooper…

As you can see, I did the finger swoop test and that’s as far as it went! So that’s my little “Ode to Nut Butters” for you guys and all I can say is I feel bad for any of you who are allergic to nuts! :-( You poor people!!!!