The Struggle is Real

Yes, even with a rice cooker!  I know, how hard can it be?!  I am telling you, hard.  The struggle is real.  Luckily most of the rice on top tastes OK. We just don't dip down and scrape the bottom when serving!

In other kitchen adventures...as part of my wild hair to eat real food I purchased natural peanut butter.  Of course I got it from Costco.  Of course it was two jars packaged together. And of course those jars were huge. The children now refer to this as the "soupy peanut butter".  AKA if you give me that I am going to revolt.  I gave the unopened jar to our local food pantry, but came across the opened one while cleaning cabinets the other day.  (Yes I do occasionally clean my cabinets!) I decided to try to make peanut butter cookies with the natural soupy stuff.  I pulled out my recipe and it called for crisco, which I don't have anymore because of my real food deal.  I quickly google "can I substitute coconut oil for crisco?" and the first hit said "YES! Absolutely do this!"  I start mixing the batter like I normally would...creaming the coconut and copious amount of brown sugar, just like I was using butter.  I turned away for a few minutes and come back to find that it is not fluffy and creamy looking, but wet and also separating.  I was a food science major, have I mentioned this before? I quickly move my 5 year old helper out of the way so I can quickly combine the rest of the ingredients and get it to bind together.  It still didn't look normal, but then again I wasn't exactly using normal ingredients for this classic recipe.  Maybe I was pushing one substitution too many? But the ultimate test is the taste of the raw batter.  Batter is my weakness.  I don't know how I have never contracted salmonella. To my surprise the batter tasted really good.  We rolled the dough balls in copious amounts of white sugar, because sugar is my only saving grace in this recipe! We baked them and my son said they were the best peanut butter cookies he had ever had.  Rice fail, cookie success.  You win some, you lose some right?! 

Rice