Get Yer Peanuts Here!

There is a great produce place down here in Cape Canaveral called Mater and Tater's. It's one of the first places I go when I am down here. We have a pretty Smeg juicer down here that I am determined to get my money out of. ("Smeg" is Swedish for expensive, I believe.) So, I like hitting the produce place thinking one of these days they are going to have big bags of valencia oranges for cheap. One would think that oranges were generally inexpensive in Florida and generally very available. One would be mistaken. The latest trip to Mater and Tater's yielded no cheap oranges. There was a good selection of rather expensive, easy to peel navel oranges. There was also some grapefruit at $1.50 per grapefruit. This is excellent if you want to pay $1.50 for a glass of fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice. I decided that I would get two of those and make a note to sell some plasma this week.

Mater and Tater's has a discount table. The selection on this trip consisted mostly of cucumbers. I figured I'd do a quick pickle one night, so picked up four cucumbers for 17 cents or something. (Probably more like $1.50 in actuality.) The other bargain I scored was a big bag of raw peanuts for three bucks. Raw peanuts in the shell look pretty much like roasted peanuts. How different could they be? I mean, when you get peanuts from the store, do they taste roasted? You can easily tell roasted pork from unroasted pork but not so much when it comes to peanuts, so I figured, Is there really that much of a difference between the two? Friends, roasting makes a difference.

Last night I decided I was going to have some peanuts. It is probably more of a texture thing, as the roasted peanuts still taste like peanuts, just a bit more, well, raw. They aren't crunchy though. I don't normally think of peanuts as being especially crunchy anyway, but the raw ones just seemed kind of stale. Like what a stale potato chip is to a normal potato chip is what a raw peanut is to a roasted peanut. I didn't have seconds.

The good news is that it is pretty easy to roast raw peanuts in your over. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, put the peanuts in on a single layer in a baking pan, and bake them around 12 minutes. Then give them a stir and bake them another ten or so minutes. Leave them for a few minutes to let them cool and finish baking. Voila! They really tasted much better and tasted better than those you get in the store or ballpark. Part of it was the warmth, but I think a big part was the freshness. Makes me wonder how long those other peanuts have been sitting around.

So why would anyone buy raw peanuts, I asked myself. I turned to ChatGPT for the answer, as I have been doing rather frequently lately. Turns out if you are making your own peanut butter, you do want to roast the peanuts first as well, just not so long as if you are eating them out of the shell. ChatGPT suggests roasting them just 10-12 minutes before putting them in the blender with a couple tablespoons of oil and blending them smooth. If you want crunchy peanut butter, stir in some chopped up peanuts after getting your batch of smooth stuff. Also add salt to taste.

If you are making boiled peanuts, you want to start with raw peanuts. Listen, I am never, ever going to make my own boiled peanuts. I've had them. I don't know why people would want to ruin a perfectly good peanut by boiling it. If you are looking to make your own boiled peanuts, you'll have to keep looking for a recipe. I'll just tell you that you start with raw peanuts.

I am going for some sort of award for the most eclectic blog in the universe. Where else can you find peanut recipes, bad haiku, and how to create a Windows installer all amongst a good amount of teenaged angst coming from the mind of a man approaching fifty?