Homemade Peanut Butter

I've had some intense cabin fever the past few weeks with all the rain & cold weather.  While I've spent a lot of time reading (& by reading I mean watching countless hours of Netflix...) & cleaning, I recently decided to also spend some time playing Susie Homemaker.  I browsed several of my cookbooks to make a meal plan for the week.  While digging through my Vitamix starter book I found a recipe for homemade peanut butter. 

I love peanut butter but I'm also aware that it's not exactly the healthiest thing for you, especially store bought ones.  Fortunately, this recipe is free of any additives or sugar.  It consists of nothing but peanuts so you can't get much more natural than that!  We picked up a couple of pounds of unsalted, roasted peanuts from The Nut Shop but you could just use a bag from your local grocer.  I opted for these because they're fresher since they were roasted that same day.  The most tedious part is definitely shelling all the nuts.  Thankfully I had Netflix to keep me company...

Homemade Peanut Butter:
3 cups of roasted, unsalted shelled peanuts

Place the peanuts into a Vitamix or other high performance blender.  Set it to Variable 1 & turn the machine on while slowly increasing the speed to Variable 10, then to High.  Make sure to keep the nuts pressed down into the blades with a tamper.  Do not blend for more than 2 minutes or you run the risk of overheating the blender.  Store in an air-tight container in the fridge. 

This should keep for a couple of weeks but you could also freeze it for longer storage.  This same technique could be applied to any variety of nut.  I found mine slightly bland since it was unsalted so you could also consider throwing in a dash of salt while blending.  If you wanted to get really creative, you could also throw in some cinnamon or raisins for a fancy nut butter!