#63: Peanut Butter Cookies
I didn’t grow up being one of those peanut butter kids. You know the peanut butter kids, right? They’re like the ketchup kids only slightly less annoying because for some reason a peanut butter fixation doesn’t seem as grating as a ketchup fixation. Anyway, despite being a tremendously picky eater, peanut butter never really took hold as a condiment in our house (to be fair, it would never have fit in with my steady diet of plain quesadillas, beans, and turkey wieners). I didn’t even arrive at peanut butter until I was well into adulthood, having always been quite put off by it up to that point. Even now, I am not a diehard peanut butter person, though I have allowed myself to succumb to the combination of chocolate and peanut butter, knowing full well that it is difficult to attain a closer level of sweet-salty perfection with any other food pairing. Peanut butter cookies were not something that I had a tremendous interest in until more recently in my life, and even so, let’s face it, I’m more of a chocolate chunk person through and through.
Today's two peanut butter cookie recipes differ mainly in their time commitment, though neither is a particularly strenuous affair (one of them is shockingly fast and ingredient-light, however, making the counter recipe seem laborious by comparison). The virtue of speed goes to the first recipe: a 5-ingredient wonder that can be prepared in a time that seems almost indecent for yielding delicious cookies from (did I mention that one of the 5 ingredients is melted dark chocolate?) The virtue of sheer peanut love goes to the second recipe, BA’s contribution: a deeply nutty, slightly chewy, slightly crunchy cookie, with a wallop of peanutty punch. Both openly declare their love for peanut butter in an unabashed way; neither steals away undue amounts of your time.
