Sometimes, when Serious Eats general manager Alaina Browne gets a free moment, she investigates the seemingly bizarre practice of giving foods a national day of their own. A couple of weeks ago, right after we put the National Pig Day content to bed, Alaina announced that April 2 was National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day.
I think of jellies as being sweet and made out of fruits, but some people like to make their PB&Js with jellies that are anything but, made with peppers and including all sorts of ingredients from sweet to savoury, like raspberries and garlic! If you don't feel like combining them with peanut butter, they can be served on crackers with cheese, or you can cook with them the way you would with chutneys.
Elise over at Simple Recipes posted a recipe for Jalapeño Pepper Jelly, if you'd like to try your hand at making some yourself. If you'd rather just buy a jar or two, Sam McGees sells eight gourmet pepper jellies (including the award-winning Bryanas Hot Red Pepper Jelly at right), the Hot Pepper Jelly Company offers nine kinds, and last but definitely not least, pepperjelly.com sells a whopping twenty-three different flavors.
Photograph from iStockphoto.com
What's the difference between jelly and jam? Can you make a peanut butter and jam? Technically that's still PB&J, right? And what are preserves? Marmalades? And conserves? These days, when it's easy to just pick up a jar of Smucker's at the supermarket, why should we bother to try to make sense of these terms? Well, because it's National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day! And because homemade jams and jellies are easy to make and delicious to eat.
Photograph from iStockphoto.com
The peanut butter and jelly sandwich easily deserves a place in the Perfect Food Pantheon, alongside pizza, barbecue, and cheeseburgers. After all, it has everything we want and need in a food: It's creamy, sweet, smooth, or crunchy. It's fruity, satisfying, filling, relatively inexpensive, and pretty good for you to boot.
But when you decide to get the fixin's for a PBJ sandwich, the choices you're confronted by can be vexing, even bewildering. And here at Serious Eats we try to simplify your food life, so we decided to test peanut butters to honor all the PBJs that have sacrificed their lives in order for us to enjoy total PBJ freedom on National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day.
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