Genius Becomes Me

I love natural peanut butter. My kids eat peanut butter by the metric ton. We go through jars of this all-important commodity like Hummers go through gasoline.

The biggest problem with natural peanut butter comes when my knife rattles around the bottom of the glass jar and I finish scraping the depths free from any remainder of gooiness. The big problem with peanut butter, with my whole life, really, is mixing the oil and peanut butter in the next jar. There has never been a good solution for this. I've tried blenders, both regular and immersion, I've tried the every popular Knife Method whereby butter knives are used to stab the glob of peanut butter until it eventually surrenders to the oil, I've tried turning the jar upside down and waiting for gravity or good luck to do the work for me. It's all ended the same. My shirt covered with oil, the jar and counter slick. I'm sure that mothers from back in the Dawn of Time struggled with the same delemia--jar of peanut butter in one hand, butter knife in the other, saying "Ugg! There has to be a better way!"

I have finally found a way to lighten the burden of this tedious household chore. I wish I could patent this, but it's too, too simple.

When I open a new jar of peanut butter, I do a couple of stabs to The Blob to help some of the oil get to the bottom of the jar. Then I microwave the jar, sans lid, for about 30 seconds. I take it out and give it a bit of a stir and pop it back in for another 30 seconds. Be careful after this, though. The jar can get kind of hot. A final stir will easily blend the oil and peanut goo together. Hurrah.

Maybe this is something that everyone knows, but for me it was like the rising sun. Now I just need to figure out how to get peanut butter off of a computer keyboard.