The PBJ bar!

Sometimes, I have ideas.  Sometimes, I have silly ones, big ones, wee ones, improbable ones and unstoppable ones.  I had a group of friends over to my house yesterday for a brunch type thing.  I was feeling exceedingly lazy, and exceptionally poor.  How best to pick a food to serve when you are feeling these things, I ask?  Some may say, "who needs food when you have mimosas?" (Unfortunately, this is a question I also asked yesterday, and 24 hours and two bottles of seltzer water later, I think I finally get it.)  Some people may also say "just go to Bodo's, stock up on the crowd pleasing carbs, and be done with it!"  No sir.  Not this day.  I wanted comfort food.  Something fun and childlike but with a twist!  And this my friends, is what I came up with:

The peanut-butter and jelly smorgasbord!


So much goodness all in one place!  I assembled fresh ground, honey roasted peanut-butter and almond-butter from our neighborhood Whole Foods, two types of crackers (a ritz style and a wheat), raisins, chocolate bits, honey, agave syrup, sliced bananas, mixed berry jelly, and finally gram-crackers.  Then, I dug in (before the guests arrived, yes.  I had to make sure this wasn't a wonderful, awful idea.)  It was everything I wanted.  The almond-butter with raisins on a wheat thin, the peanut-butter with banana and honey on a ritz, and for dessert, peanut-butter and chocolate on a gram-cracker.  Each one was so yummy, and it was the perfect different kind of snack to share.  The reviews were positive and to top it off, there wasn't much remaining at the end of the party, so that helped with the clean up.   See my friends, sometimes my ideas work out pretty well.  Sometimes they end up like the potato leek soup that I made that one time, where I didn't wash the leeks well enough, and the soup had so much sand in it that the only person that would eat it was my darling dad.  But sometimes, yes, sometimes things of beauty come out of it all.  Like knowing that leeks harbor massive amounts of sand, and also knowing that you are never too old to appreciate a good PB and J.