The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out

[venta]

For reasons which now escape me, at work yesterday we were talking about eating insects. Someone posted a link to this recipe, for "oatmealworm cookies", made with both oatmeal and mealworms. (NB That link goes to a blog about insect-eating, you have been warned

Comments

[undyingking]

You might like my peanut-butter fudge recipe? No mealworms, but it has that amiable quality of peanut-butteriness without being peanut butter.

It's dead simple and doesn't need sugar thermometers and all that kind of stuff that trad fudge recipes call for.

(Unless you don't like fudge, of course.)

[venta]

Ooh, sounds great! I love fudge, especially if it's the crumbly kind rather than the squodgy kind you get in tourist tat shops.

[undyingking]

It is crumbly to the max! (Especially if you leave the lid off.)

* Melt 125g butter (I like salted) in a pan, add 120ml semi-skimmed milk and 500g sugar (I like soft dark brown), stir.

* Bring to the boil and let it boil (without stirring) for 3 minutes.

* Take off the heat, stir in 250g crunchy peanut butter and the seeds from one vanilla pod (or a tsp of vanilla extract, I guess).

* Put 300g icing sugar in a large bowl, and pour/scrape in the hot mixture. Beat it all together with a wooden spoon until smooth and uniform. (Bonus points if you manage to do this without shooting great puffs of icing sugar all over the place.)

* Line a sided baking tray or similar (I use a lasagne dish) with baking paper, pour in the mixture, and smooth it down into a flat layer. Let it cool to room temp then pop in the fridge to chill. Cut into cubes (you should get 120 or so) and you can keep it in a sealed box for… dunno how long, but probably quite a while. It'll get eaten much sooner than that, anyway.

[venta]

That sounds most excellent, thank you! I shall try it when I next have the opportunity (ie a bunch of people to make fudge for... ChrisC is a nut-free environment and, while I'm sure I can eat 120 cubes of fudge myself, I probably shouldn't).

(I will not be putting myself forward for bonus points. I am a most terribly messy cook.)

[venta]

They're actually really nice

They're also, it turns out, something you can easily have too many of. In this case, two.

[bateleur]

Not that I'm trying to tempt you into unwisely trying peanut butter here, but it really is no one substance.

The stuff I like - Whole Earth Original Crunchy - is a lot like what you'd get if you challenged someone to embed as many chopped nuts as possible into a lump of modelling clay. That is: extremely sticky, impossibly viscous and... erm... full of nuts. Then at the other end of the spectrum you get the far cheaper "smooth" peanut butters which have the consistency of cream cheese and so much sugar in them that they taste like desserts.

In most supermarkets it's possible to get a range of stuff in between the two extremes and with varying degrees of oiliness and saltiness (varying from "quite" to "very very" of course).

And that's before you start messing with the dark arts of mixing peanut butter and chocolate spread in various proportions...

tl;dr - Liking peanut butter is a complicated business. Best leave it to the experts. ;-)

[venta]

Re: sticky and viscous. Someone once offered me some (organic, worthy) cashew nut butter on an oatcake. I figured I like cashews, I'd like it, right?

Not only was it nasty, I had to pretty much physically scrape it off the roof of my mouth :(

I suspect I have mostly tried things along the Sunpat Crunchy lines, which are probably about in the middle of your spectrum. Perhaps I should try a range to check... or perhaps I should just not, and stick to letting other people buy it and make it into gooey chocolate cookies for me :)

[ringbark]

What you need is not Reese's peanut-butter cups. Try Reese's Pieces instead. If you don't like them, let me know and I will find a way to refund you.

[venta]

Why don't I need peanut-butter cups? I mean, apart from the fact they're ridiculously expensive in this country and horrifically bad for me?

Google tells me Reese's Pieces are like Smarties but with a peanut butter middle, which sounds interesting. If I encounter some on my travels I'll try them.

[valkyriekaren]

Reese's Pieces are great. As are peanut butter M&Ms, which you can only get in America.

[ceb]

Everything made of peanut butter is nice. Peanut butter is horrible. You don't need to check :-)