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Struggle Meals: Peanut Butter

When the pandemic started in our area, the Mild Wife had no idea how things would change. At the time, it seemed like the quarantine might last a few weeks, possibly a month. Now that the quarantine measures have been going for several months, however, it's easier to look back and spot some of the changes that have popped up in our lives.

One of the most obvious places to spot the changes is in our meals. In a previous post, I mentioned that the Mild Wife quipped that some of our early adjustments were "struggle meals" because we ended up eating large quantities of basic staples. However, this also started bleeding over into the rest of my day, not just the three main meals.

As you can probably guess from the title of the post, I'm talking about the fact that I have been eating a lot more peanut butter lately. Once we'd found a way to make sure we had basic nutrition covered, we started to add on a few more embellishments here and there. It started out as a simple idea: could we introduce more protein into our diets? Lean protein with "good" fat was obviously higher on our list than the alternative, but we also weren't sure that we would be able to continuously acquire meat. So, we turned our eyes to peanut butter as an alternative.

Now, I've always known that I liked the taste of peanut butter, but it wasn't one of the main sources of flavor before. Now that we had fewer options, however, I leaned on that particular food item more often. If I wanted to add some flavor to my oatmeal, I mixed in a dollop of peanut butter. If I wanted a snack in the afternoons, I would mix some peanut butter with some almonds or dried fruit. Basically, I started having peanut butter pretty close to every single day. The Mild Wife found this all pretty amusing, and there were quite a few jokes about my increased peanut butter consumption.

Still, given that I was eating so much peanut butter, we decided to try to buy it in bulk. If I was going to be eating that much of it, we could either buy a regular sized jar over and over again, or we could buy a larger jar less often. The latter option is cheaper in the long run, so it seemed like a pretty good idea. What surprised me, however, was just how large "bulk" was. In this case, the best option was a 5 pound tub of peanut butter. Yes, you read that correctly. Five. Pounds.

All of this came to a head when we were talking to some friends on a video call recently. I mentioned in an off-hand comment that one of my favorite snacks was mixing almonds with peanut butter, and the conversation quickly turned to the fact that we have this large container of peanut butter in the house. Since it was a video call, the Mild Wife even pulled it out so our friends could see the jar. That led to:

Friend: "Oh, wow. But it's been a few months, right?"
Me: "Uh, that's my second jar ..."

Yeah, you can imagine the laughter that followed that particular comment. Let's just say that I can't help but chuckle every time I pull out the jar of peanut butter from the fridge.

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