What kind of peanut butter? I often buy peanuts at a reduced price after the holidays and make my own peanut butter in the food processor. I also use powdered peanut butter and reconstitute it with water and add a little coconut oil to smooth out the texture. (Powdered peanut butter is a home food storage staple.) When Dillons (our Kroger associated grocery store) sends me a coupon for a free jar of Kroger peanut butter, I'll use that. The price of an 18-oz. jar of it has more than doubled over the last few years, so it MUST be good...... If I'm feeling wild and crazy I'll make sunflower seed butter and use that for something different. I'm not one of those "picky" people who choose Jif - because it normally doesn't fit my food budget. We regularly use 18-oz. of peanut butter per month without using it for cookies. This is our newest favorite peanut butter cookie recipe.... PEANUT BUTTER CRUNCH COOKIES Heat or microwave to liquefy: 1 stick of butter 3/4 c. peanut butter Add remaining ingredients: 1 t. baking soda pinch of salt 2 eggs 1 c. unsalted dry roasted peanuts 1/2 c. raw or roasted sunflower seeds 1/2 c. almond flour (or wheat flour) 1/2 c. palm sugar (or brown sugar) 1/2 c. mini semi-sweet chocolate chips 1/2 c. cacao nibs (optional) Use an electric mixer to blend. Use a #50 portion scoop to portion cookies and place on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet. Press dough down slightly. Bake in a preheated 375-degree F. oven for 12-minutes. -Grainlady

If you want something a little different, you might like this recipe. I use to make this peanut butter and chocolate cookie tart all the time to take to the school bake sales when my son was young. The teachers would buy up the trays before they ever made it too the bake sale table. I'm not a peanut butter fan, so I've adapted the recipe over the years to make a shortbread cup for the chocolate filling. This is what the cookie looks like as the shortbread version. The peanut butter version looks the same except the cookie dough is a more golden brown. Home Cookin Chapter: Recipes From Thibeault's Table Peanut butter and chocolate cookie Tarts ======================================== Dough 3/4 cup butter 3/4 cup peanut butter smooth 3/4 cup brown sugar 3/4 cup white sugar 1 egg 1 egg yolk 2 tsp vanilla 2 1/4 cups flour 3/4 teaspoon baking soda Chocolate filling 4 oz semisweet chocolate 1 Tablespoon Milk 2 Tablespoons cocoa 1/3 cup butter 2 cups sifted Icing Sugar . Cream butter with peanut butter until very smooth. Beat in sugars. Beat in egg and yolk. Add vanilla. Sift flour with baking soda and mix well. Stir into butter mixture. Press balls of dough into well buttered mini muffin tins. Each ball of dough should be about 3/4's the size of the muffin tin - when you intent the centre it should form the shape of a pudgy little tart shell. Bake in preheated 350ðF oven for 15 minutes or until outside is baked but inside is still chewy. Do not over bake. Cool five minutes on rack and then remove from tins. Cool completely. Filling Combine chocolate, cocoa, milk and butter in small saucepan. Melt over low heat. Mix until smooth. Cool. Beat in icing sugar to give consistency of icing. Pipe about 1 tablespoon of filling into each tart. Note: YOu can spoon the filling in to the centre, but it looks nicer when piped.

Don't get into the salt/caramel thing either. Do pour a pile of salt on the plate and dip the radishes in it tho, used to occasionally sprinkle a little salt on top of a celery stick. The recipes I got from my mother were from way back when there was no unsalted butter available so the recipe said "butter" it was no choice but salted butter and usually there was something like a quarter tsp of salt so no big deal. The extra grain or two of salt in a cookie would not be discernible, especially in peanut butter cookies! I didn't start using unsalted butter until probably 15 or 20 years ago. It was not common at the time either. The only time I noticed an issue was when I made some mud bars and I had goofed the first time I made them so the icing turned out to be thick, rich fudge. So good, I kept doing it that way and everyone loved it. But I made some and it was SO salty even I had trouble eating it (and this comes from a person who at the time still put salt on ham!). Amount of salt was tiny so my guess was it had to be the butter, hence the switch to unsalted and usually buy it ever since unless I'm buying soft butter. Don't see an unsalted version of the soft stuff.

Lucille, those cookies look good. My boss used to call shortbread and butter cookies "sugar held together with butter", LOL. What's not to like about that?!! I like the Kerrygold and it's the only butter my Mother will eat, she says the grocery store butter, even Land O Lakes, doesn't "taste right" and makes her toast soggy when it melts. She prefers the salted but will use the unsalted Kerrygold before she'll used any of the regular store brands, salted or unsalted. I have about 20 half pound packages of Kerrygold unsalted in my freezer, it freezes well. It's for my Christmas baking, I found a lot of it on sale at the local grocery, about a month from the expiration date, for $1.55 a package. They had three cases but I didn't have freezer room and didn't want to be greedy, so I bought 20 of the half pound packages. I think I may have used one, but they'll all be gone before I finish holiday baking and meals along with those couple of packages used by Mother for her toast. I like it far better than the "generic" grocery store butter that I get at Aldi or Costco. The news has been threatening more "shortages" and limits on purchases so I'm all stocked up on flour, sugar, butter, baking chocolate. This pandemic will NOT interfere with my holiday baking! Annie