If there is one food I have a real love-hate relationship with, it's peanut butter. It's a permanent feature at my table, whether spread across a bagel for breakfast, sandwiched with a banana for lunch, or serving as an affordable and satisfying substitute to typical late night fare.
However, my love for this king of spreads can sometimes lead to gluttonous despair as I look down to see the bag of Peanut Butter M&M's suddenly empty, my stomach grumbling in rebellion.
Still, while my stomach may sometimes hate me for it, my love for the thick, crunchy condiment endures, and on National Peanut Butter Lover's day, in the middle of a recall crisis that has pulled over 2,500 different peanut products off of store shelves, I sought to honor my love with a truly unique meal experience.
The plan: make a meal on National Peanut Butter Lover's day, March 1, that would express my unadulterated love for peanut butter. The meal: peanut butter barbecue chicken pizza. The potential conflict: the recent national peanut butter recall. Would an irresponsible peanut company foil my plans? As it turns out, not at all.
In early January, after a salmonella outbreak left five people dead and over 400 sick, the Peanut Corporation of America issued a recall on all of its products produced at its Blakely, Ga, plant in the previous six months. The company, which produced peanut butter and peanut paste in bulk, had discovered 12 different salmonella contaminations at the plant in 2007 and 2008.
However, when second examinations found nothing, the company continued to ship its products without cleaning the potentially contaminated plant. The company's Texas plant proved just as unclean when FDA inspections last month discovered dead mice and feces in various locations of the plant.
The negligence of the Peanut Corporation of America has led to a continuous stream of recalls. Because the peanut paste that the Peanut Corporation of America produced was often used by more than one company before the final products reached store shelves, tracking the peanut paste has been a tedious process, and recalls continue daily.
Fortunately, those of us whose primary peanut butter consumption comes from a jar of JIF or Skippy need not worry, as the threat of contamination does not stretch to the consumer level of major peanut butter companies.
Reassured by this knowledge, I went to the grocery store on March 1st, recipe in hand, to collect the ingredients of what would hopefully be a delicious peanut butter barbeque chicken pizza.
Now, this may sound a bit disgusting, but think about it for a minute. Peanut chicken is a very common Thai dish.
Kung Pao chicken was always my dad's Chinese takeout meal of choice. Both dishes combine peanuts and chicken effectively, so how different could throwing a bit of crunchy peanut butter on barbecue chicken pizza really be?
After purchasing the ingredients, I went to a friend's house to create the peanut butter masterpiece. Chicken breast was combined with peanut butter and barbecue sauce and then spread onto the premade pizza crust. Topped with onions and ricotta and cheddar cheeses, the pizza was placed in the oven with care and apprehension. Half an hour later, only minutes after coming out of the oven, half of it had disappeared.
Needless to say, it was not bad at all. The peanut butter served as a nice thickening agent, essentially creating a creamier, richer barbecue sauce. In fact, if the pizza had any faults, they were the recipe's choices of cheese, neither of which added to the pizza's flavor.
Despite the current peanut butter recall, you need not fear indulging in peanut butter. I know I certainly won't. As one of the most economical sources of protein, according to the U.S. Department of agriculture, it is both convenient and flexible. Whether on a bagel or toast, used as a dip for apples or carrots alike, or even on a pizza with barbecue sauce and chicken, peanut butter will remain common at my table.
National Peanut Butter Lover's Day may have passed, but there's still time to celebrate National Peanut Month with this clever culinary concoction.
