the chocolate peanut butter gallery

The caped crusader is officially on the loose – in a store near you!

It has been far too long, my peanut butter-loving friends, but I am so excited to be back to share this amazing new product with you. My friend Nick recently launched his very own line of natural peanut butters called Peanut Butter Boy. Like myself, he’s been enthusiastically writing about peanut butter for a few years so if it’s anyone you can trust your prized PB&J in the hands of, it’s him.

What makes his peanut butter so super, you ask? In his words, it’s:

• Super-natural, low stir and gluten free.
• Made with no added sugar.
• Made with natural sea salt.
• Made with only “unblanched peanuts” which means that he doesn’t take off the peanut skins during manufacturing. This yields a peanut butter that has more flavor and nutrients – including more fiber, antioxidants and resveratrol. It also means that the peanut butter is less processed and more natural.

Basically, Nick’s peanut butter is quite possibly the closest you can get to freshly ground peanut butter without actually having to farm peanuts and grind em yourself. It has such a natural peanut flavor and both varieties have amazing texture. If you scoop out a spoonful of Crunch Power, you might even find peanut halves! Both varieties are a little salty, which counter-balances sweet jellies for truly the best PB&Js.

Become a believer and try it yourself. As far as I know, he doesn’t yet have a “bat signal” type thing, but til he does you can order online. Once you do, you can try out some of the yummy recipes on his blog. Two of my personal favorites are his awesome Thai Peanut Salad Dressing and his sweet but satisfying Gluten Free Peanut Butter Granola Bars.

(Minor self promo: I designed the the PB Boy logo, label and website. Have I mentioned I’m excited about this brand?!)

There are certain foods in the world with names that work against them. Ugly fruit sounds like Mother Nature’s reject, gravlax sounds like an evil creature from Lord of the Rings, and hemp sounds about as tasty as an old burlap sack.

My mother-in-law drinks hemp milk and even though I’ve been to her house many times with the ability to take just a little taste without having to buy and potentially chuck a whole container of it, I still haven’t brought myself to go for it. Hemp milk. It just sounds wrong- and I’ve tried (and liked) plenty of other non-dairy milks like soy, almond, hazelnut and rice. Hemp just takes it a teensy step too far.

Or so I thought – until I saw these Wilderness Poets Nut Butters. It’s possible that hemp in nut butter form was just a more comfortable platform for me, but I went for it. Despite the leap, I fully expected to detest the hemp butter and anticipated washing its offensive flavor down with the pecan butter. Considering the small size of the container and little risk of food waste, it was worth knowing for sure.

Turned out, I was wonderfully surprised: the hemp butter was great. Not good, it was actually great! I devoured it. It has a pleasantly seedy texture that gives the sandwich a little body. I’ve had peanut butter with flax seeds in it and wasn’t wild about that extremely seedy texture, but these seeds mesh a bit more with the peanut butter. Or maybe they just grind em down or something… whatever the case, it worked for me. The roasted hemp gives it really nice, deep body, which is great on its own or with a little banana and honey.

According to their site, there are some benefits of eating hemp (note: not acquired by eating burlap sacks) including that it’s a living plant energy, it has the perfect balance of Omega 3&6 EFA’s, it has the most potent protein of any plant source (good for us vegetarians), and it contains all 10 essential amino acids as well as other important vitamins & minerals. Not to mention that this particular hemp butter is vegan and free of sugar, soy, gluten, trans fats, GMO and cholesterol.

Wilderness Poets’ mission statement declares, “We strive to inspire mindfulness and good health through energizing, life giving foods. We believe that sharing delicious, wholesome foods, grown on small organic family farms, can help heal people, our communities, and planet.”

Their efforts are ex-hemp-lary if you ask me. (Sorry. Please come back to the blog.)

Pick up some Oregon Hazelnut Hempspread Butter from Seattle-area based Wilderness Poets. They have a lot of unique flavors and you can try a few with their handy sample pack.

We now interrupt our regularly scheduled programming…

So, I wasn’t actually going to write a separate blog post about the many bars that I acquired in Portland, partly because I bought too many bars at once and set off eating them way too quickly. But, then I tasted this Brown Butter Bar by Xocolatl De David and life as I knew it changed. You know you’ve found a good chocolate bar when it literally stops you in your tracks. And when everyone around you freaks out about it too. It’s not just you, it’s fricking amazing chocolate.

The bar’s description from The Meadow, the wonderful chocolate shop we purchased it from in Portland goes as follows:

“Xocolatl de David’s latest creation is possibly his masterpiece: a dark chocolate bar magically imbued with the rich browned butter flavors. Rich, savory-sweet silkiness in an unassuming package that will, after one bite, have you making a U-turn back to the store to pick up another.”

That “U-turn” comment couldn’t be more accurate. I think all four of us who tasted it did exactly that. The move was like a physical, “Say what?!”.

This bar is super crazy smooth and has an amazing brown butter flavor. How genius of them was it to develop that flavor anyway? Of course brown butter would be awesome as a chocolate flavor because brown butter’s awesome with everything. This bar is caramelly, perfectly salty and it just absolutely mmmmmmmelts in your mouth.

On a side note, I just want to throw it out there that it’s really cool that they have a link to the firm who designed the packaging right on the packaging itself. It’s not something that maybe any (?) other brands include on their packaging, but considering what a huge part package design plays in influencing the consumer to pick up a product, I think it makes perfect sense to be on there. Nicely done. Designed by Fullblast Creative.

On another aesthetic note, I kind of like that their bar (see above pic) is perfectly smooth on the surface with no square shapes or logos- nothing to take away from the simply awesome tasting experience.

Xocolatl De David Brown Butter. Go.

Traveling around the country has been fun for so many reasons. One of the nerdier reasons being that it’s been fun to peek in different gourmet shops and farmer’s markets we go to see new local products that we can’t get at home.

While we were in Montana, we quickly noticed that there existed huckleberry everything – huckleberry jam, huckleberry syrup, huckleberry honey… even huckleberry ice cream and huckleberry beer! I’m not sure if I’d ever tried it previous to our visit there, but I happened to find some good jam at a gas station souvenir shop (no, really) and despite where I found it, it was awesome! My qualifiers are that it has to have a first ingredient of fruit (not sugar) and is that it is void of weird preservatives. Oh, and it has to taste good.

Once we got to Oregon, berry goods were still everywhere but the flavor changed to Oregon’s popular berry, the Marionberry. Hoping it might prove just as good as the huckleberry, I picked up some Marionberry syrup and Marionberry jam.

Not all jams are not all created equal. This one actually has cute little berries in it! If you eat it straight, you can also taste the little tiny seeds, but they weren’t detectable in a sandwich. The berries gave it a nice texture and the flavor was tart and wine-like. It felt like a sophisticated pb&j (if such a thing exists).

Apparently the berry itself doesn’t have the most romantic story of origin as it’s a man-made hybrid of other berries. According to Wikipedia, “The berry was released in 1956 under the name Marion, after the county where it was tested extensively. Oregon produces between 28 million and 33 million pounds annually, with Marion County and Willamette Valley collectively accounting for over 90% of current production. The marionberry’s growing conditions are perfectly adapted to the mild, maritime Oregon climate, with its mild rains and warm summers. The berries ripen throughout late spring and early summer. The harvesting season is typically between July 10 and August 10, with a single acre producing up to six tons in a harvest.”

Hm… it’s the end of August… maybe I’ll get to taste a fresh one? I’ll keep my eyes peeled. Til then, I’m pretty happy with the jarred stuff.

Keep your eyes peeled for Marionberry jam!

So, I need to catch you up on something…

In falling slightly behind on some CPB posts, I also fell behind on telling you about the way awesome trip we’re on. A while back, Taste Tester and I came up with this nice idea to go on a two-week delayed honeymoon down the California coast. Then one day he asked if maybe we should go for a month. The next thing I knew, we were packing our bags for a 6 month “work-cation”. Basically, we are traveling all over the country (and Canada) for 6 months, working normal hours during the week and enjoying our new amazing scenery on the nights and weekends. We are both incredibly lucky to have jobs that allow us to work remotely and decided to go for it. And let me tell you – best decision ever. With friends and family located across the country, we’ve had a lot of great visits and experiences with them and have taken full advantage of their insider tips.

Among the many benefits of this trip, the one that pertains to you and this blog is that I’ve gotten to try a host of new bakeries and food brands. Since I slacked for the first part of the trip (I’m sorry for that, but there was quite a bit of driving between NJ and Seattle, with two side trips to Canada), here’s the Cliff Notes version:

Niagra Falls, Canada: Full of happy people with funny accents, tourist traps and crazy awesome waterfalls. We rode The Maid of the Mist in a thunderstorm. It was a nice start to our crazy adventure.

Fargo, SD: Yup, we visited the famous wood chipper. They supply you with the hats and post your pic on their visitor center Facebook wall. No joke.

Mitchell, SD: Any trip across the country would be time wasted without a visit to the epic Corn Palace. They’ve redecorated the exterior with different designs made of corn every year since the early 1900s. That’s dedication.

The Badlands: It was extremely hot the day we were there, but awesome. One of the weirdest landscapes I’ve ever seen.

Devil’s Tower: We watched a couple of people scale this. Yeah… we hiked around instead.

Glacier National Park: Seriously, this is so pretty it looks fake, no? Such a cool place.

Canmore, AB: One of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. We drove through Kootenay and Banff National Parks on the way there- if you haven’t been, go to there. Everyone keeps asking what our favorite place has been and it’s hard to say, but this area had one of the more incredible landscapes we’ve seen.

We hiked up a big mountain – not as big as the above one, but big nonetheless. You can see that I was tired and ready for a donut break, but it was breathtakingly pretty.

Tillamook Forest Center (Oregon): Me with Smokey the Bear. Is it embarrassing that it felt like I was meeting a celebrity? Hey, I’ve seen a lot of his commercials!

Portland, OR: Taste Tester and I dining on a lovely vegan lunch (photo cred: The Baking Bird! – more on her in a sec). We pretty much ate constantly in Portland, so this seems like an appropriate pic for our time there.

And now, onto the food!

Not to diss my city, but I think NYC has kind of a false pretense of being the end-all be-all of food. But everywhere we’ve gone in the whole northwestern area of the country, we’ve eaten amazing things that could easily hold up to NYC standards (minus the sticker shock). And between all the coffee roasters, micro-breweries and small-batch chocolate makers and bakeries across the country, we’ve had our hands (er – tummies) too full to be too nostalgic for our home-based foods. At least thus far.

We were lucky enough to spend 3 whole weeks in Portland, which has a pretty incredible food scene. Of all of places there, the one that was on my list for far too long was – you probably guessed it – Voodoo Donuts.

I did a bad thing though- I walked in there blindly. I didn’t do my usual thorough research and didn’t have my winning flavor picked out before we even got there. Which was bad- because they have TONS of flavors! I was totally overwhelmed. As a newfound vegetarian, I passed on their signature Bacon Maple Bar (later finding out that it’s “amazing” – oops!). I also found out later that the donut pictured behind the Bacon Maple is The Memphis Mafia, which is, “fried dough with banana chunks and cinnamon sugar covered in a glaze with chocolate frosting, peanut butter, peanuts and chocolate chips on top”. What a goof. How did I miss out on that?

We picked up a handful of donuts which included the Old Dirty Bastard (a raised yeast doughnut with chocolate frosting, Oreo’s and peanut butter) pictured below, and on a whim- an apple fritter. The Old Dirty Bastard was actually better the next day, when the oreos got softer and the whole thing tasted like more of a cohesive creation than a donut with things stuck to it. I enjoyed it, but I really enjoyed the apple fritter. It had a caramelized, glazed exterior and a soft apple-filled interior. It made me wish I had tasted the Memphis Mafia, since it’s fried the same way and topped with my favorite things- but not to worry- I have faith that we will some day be back!

I also later received an insider tip that their vegan donuts are great and actually maybe even better than the regular donuts. Who did I receive such a tip from? None other than the awesome Kylie of Baking Bird!

After following her adorable blog for so long, it was really cool to meet her and get to chat about blogs, food, Portland, life, etc. in – what else? – a cute little bakery. She’s fairly new to the town herself, but confirmed that our 3-week takeaway was accurate: Portland is a really cool city with lots of ground to cover.

This yummy Mini Vegan Chocolate Zucchini Bread from Back to Eden Bakery was one of many tasty treats I acquired based on her advice.

Shall I share some more? How bout this chocolate and peanut butter Charlie Brown Bar from Sweet Pea Baking Co. (also vegan):

One of the cool things about the Sweet Pea Baking Co. is that it’s located in a “Vegan Mini-Mall” with a vegan grocery store, vegan clothing store and even a vegan tattoo parlor! Vegan tattoos – who’d have thought?

The above CPB bar of course reminds me of the below CPB bar, which was from Crema Bakery.

Both CPB bars were great. With an increasing sensitivity to animals, I really enjoy partaking in vegan treats and this one was sweet and indulgent. The Crema version was made with house-made PB (nice!), good dark chocolate and had a crunchy base that I think may have had granola in it. Oh, and their chai latte was kickass too. Their bagels and other pastries looked great, but they’ll have to wait til next time!

Before leaving town, we snagged some Chocolate Potato Donuts with crème anglaise at Tasty n’ Sons:

The donuts were piping hot and the sauce was rich and refreshing. Our brunch there was pretty awesome all around. You have to get there at least 20 minutes before opening to beat the crowd, but it was well worth it. “Auntie Paula’s French Toast with with mixed-berry maple & whipped cream” was wonderful as well. So many amazing brunch places, so little time!

And the last spot in Portland that I have to show you some pics of was The Meadow, a chocolate and salt shop in the super hip Mississippi neighborhood.

I wish I could have just purchased this entire wall straight up and have it installed in my apartment. Wow.

There were many awesome flavors that I’ve somehow never seen before.

Such a cool shop. Felt like a mix of fancy food shop and old school pharmacy.

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Even though I had just bought three local bars the day before, we still walked away with all this. I may need an intervention, but I don’t care. That Apple Pie Bar is where it’s at.

Whew, this has really turned into a doosey of a post, but as you can see – we’ve had a lot going on. Before I go, here’s a mini list of some of my other favorite eats in Portland. I know, it’s a lot- but judging from my conversation with Kylie and a related Portlandia skit, noting Portland eateries to be visited at a later time is just kind of what you do. So here goes, in no particular order:

- Sindy Chocolate from Helvetic (purchased at Barista, maker of excellent lattes)
- Bakery Bar: Everything we had there was great, but specific callouts go to the homemade granola and amazing buttery Sharp Cheddar-Scallion Scones
- Waffle Window: Peanut Butter Chocolate Dipped Waffle – picture here!
- Farm Cafe: Dinner / Cocktails – esp. the corn fritters with green tomato jam
- Vita Cafe: Thai soup (vegan)
- Hair of the Dog: Fred beer
- Ken’s Artisan Pizza: Spring Onion Pizza – and that’s coming from a NJ/NY’er
- Off the Griddle: Vegan Cheeseburger w/Housemade Pickles – best veggie burger I think I’ve ever had. After resorting to some other dismal veggie burgers on the road, this one made me so happy I almost wanted to cry.
- Salt and Straw: Almond Brittle with Salted Ganache Ice Cream

Yeah. We ate really well there.

And now we’re here! (That’s Seattle behind us if you can’t make out the Space Needle on the left). I concentrated mostly on Portland in this post, but we really did have an amazing time everywhere and eat wonderfully delicious things the whole way out. If anyone has any Seattle recommendations, shoot them my way! Because if it’s one thing we’ve been reminded of on this trip, it’s that time flies – and we want to make the most of it.

If we’ve made you jealous, I’m sorry. If you think we’re crazy, just check out this guy. And if you want to see more, stay tuned! Big thanks to Kylie and all of our truly amazing family and friends along the way for helping make this adventure a crazy great one.