Peanuts – The Inspired Parent

Taffy Apple Salad

Continuing our salad week, we’re hitting the sweet side with today’s recipe.

We’ve tried many versions of Taffy Apple Salad over the years as we searched for one with a great punch of caramel flavor, a nice mix of sweet & salty, one that travels well and is people-pleaser.

After tweaking things a bit, the ratios in this recipe gave us what we’re looking for & this delightful Taffy Apple Salad is the one we’ve stuck with for a few years now.

We love using Spanish peanuts — they’re pretty & we prefer the larger pieces of peanutty goodness — but if you prefer smaller bits, using salted, chopped peanuts would work, too.

Regarding the apples, we like adding tart & sweet in the mix to keep things balanced. It’s fun to change-up the varieties to see what you prefer the most.

Enjoy!

[amd-zlrecipe-recipe:14]

The Perfect Peanut Butter Cookie

We’ve tried so many different types of peanut butter cookies over the years & they are often sub-par…either too sweet or too greasy/oily, with very little peanut flavor. We have found one recipe that has consistently beat out all the rest. These peanut butter cookies are somewhere between chewy & cake-like…they have a slight crisp around the edges and are wonderfully puffy in the center. Using chunky-style peanut butter in combination with the extra addition of crushed peanuts gives a peanut flavor above all others we’ve tried.

This amazing recipe, adapted from our well-worn, 2004 copy of Baking Illustrated by the Editors of Cook’s Illustrated Magazine, is by far our absolute favorite. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

[amd-zlrecipe-recipe:7]