Tuesday Dinners

Step by Step Directions

We’re going to be making a graham cracker crust from scratch (because we like making things more difficult for ourselves). If you have a food processor that will be very helpful for making a consistent grind on the crackers. If you don’t… then put them all in a bag and grab a rolling pin or some other blunt object and start bashing them. This is a fun job to give to anyone young or those that you don’t trust with knives.

Once that’s done then melt butter and mix that in with your brown sugar and cracker crumbs until the crackers are evenly coated.

Pack your crumbs into a pie plate with a deeper well in the center and a ridge along the outside. You can make this even by using the bottom of a glass or a potato masher if you have one of those. You just want to make sure it’s compact.

Bake that in a 350 degree oven for 10 minutes, or until you’re sure it won’t break on you. Set it aside to cool.

In a bowl mix together your cream cheese (it’s easier if it’s room temperature, but not impossible to use if it’s not), peanut butter and powdered sugar. We’re going to mix them all together.

Essentially we are trying to “cream” the peanut butter, which is normally a process of incorporating air into a sugar and fat mixture, but peanut “butter” actually refers to the spreadability and not the dairy or fat content, so it won’t work perfectly. Essentially just make it uniform.

Feel free to use store bought whipped cream, in fact it’s encouraged.

Or if you have a electronic mixer of any kind please use it. You don’t know how long it takes to actually whip cream, it’s really not that fun.

Combine your heavy whipping cream, vanilla extract and remaining powdered sugar. Whisk until the ingredients are combined and the cream is self supporting.

“Fold” you two mixtures together, so just combine them in a single bowl. If you only wanted to use one bowl then you probably could have made the whipped cream first and just added the other ingredients, completely up to the person who has to do the dishes.

Stir until there is a uniform consistency. Ideally you’ll be able to spread the mixture fairly easily but it won’t be runny at all.

Spoon the mixture into your pie crust and smooth it out so there is an even coverage of filling across the crust.

Throw your pie in either the freezer or the fridge and allow it to set for a couple of hours. There’s nothing stopping you from eating it before it’s set other than decorum (I guess).

You can either eat the pie as is or you can add any toppings you want. Completely up to you, I melted some chocolate chips in the microwave poured it over the top of the pie, thought it looked ugly and then just stuck a bunch of chocolate chips directly into it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so feel free to do whatever you want.

Enjoy.

Variations

• Use chocolate or peanut butter in the crust. You can buy chocolate graham crackers, and you can add a dollop of peanut butter to the crust without changing the consistency too much.
• Use chocolate in the filling, just add some melted chocolate (or chocolate chips) when mixing everything together.
• Buy premade ingredients (whipping by hand sucks).

Unsolicited Feedback

• HW: Not enough chocolate.
• BA: What? Apple not good enough for you? Just couldn’t be seen eating pumpkin?
• FA: I like it because the peanut butter doesn’t stick to the roof of your mouth.