Peanut Butter and Brown Sugar

So this afternoon I was in the mood for peanut butter cookies. Whle you can find creamy peanut butter here, it is in a teeny tiny jar and costs about $5.00. So we make our own by putting roasted peanuts (which are cheap) into our food processor, adding a little oil and grinding it into peanut butter. We love it for sandwiches, but it does not make a good cookie. For that, I needed the creamy kind with all the partially-hydrogenated shortening added. Someone brought a jar from the States at some point and as I saw it sitting on the shelf today, I decided to use it for the cookies. David and Rachel are away at elementary camp this week so I enlisted Mathis's help, which he was more than happy to provide, and we made cookies. As I skimmed the list of ingredients needed, I came to brown sugar. You cannot buy brown sugar here. It is not difficult to make your own, but it does take time and effort to mix the white sugar with molasses. I usually make a few cups at a time and keep it in the cupboard, but today we were out. So I made one cup of brown sugar, added it in and proceeded to make delicious peanut butter cookies. Mathis enjoyed using a fork to make the criss crosses.

All that to say that today I was thinking about how I make peanut butter and make brown sugar and make salsa and all kinds of other things from scratch here out of necessity and I got excited about the prospect of going to the grocery store in Chattanooga and just buying a bag of brown sugar and a jar of natural peanut butter. I'm looking forward to it.