Info IT

Perfect Peanut Butter Bars

Hey, are you here to check out my giveaway? If so, scroll down to the post below, or just click here! There is still one more week left to enter, so dont miss it! :)

Our church is having a dessert auction tonight, to raise money for Wordsowers International. Since Jeremy and I love peanut butter and chocolate so much (remember these Buckeye Balls I made in April?), we decided to stick with that theme.

Jeremy made the most delicious peanut butter bars ever, and I cut them up, drizzled the white chocolate, and did the fancy display. There wasnt enough room on the platter to include all the bars, drats! I guess Ill have to eat some myself!


The pressed glass serving platter was a thrift store find, in perfect condition, so pretty and only $2! I also found about 2 yards of gorgeous linen (the background for these pictures!), a wooden spool and bobbin holder, 4 Land Before Time movies for Kade, and a cool old glass jar Im going to use for a moss terrarium! I love thrift stores :)

So, these bars are too good to not share the recipe! Here ya go:

• 1 cup butter or margarine, melted
• 2 cups graham cracker crumbs
• 2 cups confectioners sugar
• 1 cup peanut butter
• 1.5 cups semisweet chocolate chips
• 4 tablespoons peanut butter
• .5 cup white chocolate chips

Available link for download

Peanut butter disproves supports evolution

The Metro has, rather sarcastically, reported on the "no new life in peanut butter" argument seen below:



This is an interesting example of using bad science to defend "intelligent design" because its not really wrong, and is basically a badly thought out version of the Urey Miller Experiment,.

This type of experiment is pretty simple, hell even I managed to demonstrate a version of it for a science show I was once involved in. You just get a air tight tank and sterilize it to remove all traces of life (and anything else). Then fill it with what you think the early Earth had (water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen, and in newer models iron and carbonate minerals). Finally you add a source of energy, which in this case was regular sparks of electricity to simulate lighting strikes and let it run.

If you come back to it a few weeks later what do you have? Obviously you dont have a little ant roaming around like they suggest in the video. But you do get a bunch of organic molecules and even amino acids. Which are the foundation of all life on the planet.

Of crucial importance, is that this is a tiny little experiment running for a week. It has sizes and timescales we can comprehend, as such coming back to it and finding it full of fish is ridiculous, but even so the first building blocks can appear in front of our eyes.

Hows that jump to life made? There lies a noble prize. Im sure one day well work it out.

But now taking into account that it took life 2 billion years to appear on Earth, and Earth has a surface area about 5000 billion times bigger than an experiment of 1 square meter it becomes reasonable to think that the Earth has enough rolls of the dice to do this buy itself.

Because it only has to do it once.




The man who came up with this idea, Stanley Miller, past away in May 2007 (aged 77), in the picture above he is standing with his experiment, and hes not too different from the creationist with his pot of peanuts. He just thought harder. For longer.

He made this world a better, brighter, place. Carl Sagan went as far as to say that his work was:

The single most significant step in convincing many scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos.

Miller convinced me, but the peanut guy needs to work on his act.

Available link for download

Peanut Shell Ghosts

Weve been snacking on peanuts quite a bit lately. I find that my daughters like cracking the shells in addition to eating the contents inside. Typically, I bring a bowl of peanuts outside for those times when they need a snack-between-snacks outside. (Also it is a lot less messier to eat them outside than inside.) With all the peanut snacking going on I kept thinking about how the shells remind me of the shape of ghosts. So, last craft day we painted peanut shells white using white poster paint. And as it turned out they really do look like ghosts! I used a black sharpie to draw the eyes and mouth after they were dry.




After some thought about what to do with the ghosts we decided on making a haunted cemetery. The base is a square of styrofoam covered with felt. I cut slits in the felt and inserted rocks and twigs we found on a nature walk.




The ghosts are standing on toothpicks and we even made a bat out of a leaf and pinecone. All this lead to a little rearranging of the nature table to include the newly made haunted cemetery.

Available link for download

Peanut Butter SURPRISE Cookies

);

Available link for download

Peanut Butter Rice Crispy Bars

 I met my husband when I was just 15 and I can still remember my very-young-self standing in the kitchen next to my future mother-in-law making "Peanut Butter Balls" for the first time.  The first thing I realized was that these peanut butter balls were nothing like the peanut butter balls that I had ever had because they were not covered in chocolate.  The second thing I realized was that my would-be husband really liked them.  Thus, I wrote the recipe down on an index card and we have been making them ever since...well, at least we have been making a tweaked version of the recipe.

Available link for download