It's Just Too Easy to Make Some Girls Happy

I love peanut butter jars. This fact was reaffirmed to me today as I was baking my very first pear pie. I make all kinds of fruit pies; they’re kind of my specialty. I had, however, never made a pear pie before, and as we have picked a literal plethora (I counted) of pears from our neighbor’s tree, I decided it was time to give it a try. Our neighbor asked us to take the pears, by the way; she doesn’t care for them, but she does love the pear butter I make out of them, so it works out nicely.

I also love gadgets. Kitchen gadgets, to be sure, but just gadgets of any ilk will do. In my sewing room I regularly use my bodkin, and my snippers, and my tailor’s point and ham. I’m equally as likely to get distracted in the power tools section of the local Home Depot as in the baking section at Kitchen’s Etc. I wander the aisles at VIP Auto Parts until my husband rolls his eyes and begs to go home. It’s a really good thing that I learned my lesson in the Ronco Clothes Steamer fiasco of 1994, or I would waste even more money on Only-As-Seen-On-TV gadgets. If it cuts my work time in half, has multiple uses, comes in an attractive carrying case, or is also available in Cranberry, I’m a sucker for it! Don’t even get me started on Tupperware . . . .

Which brings me to peanut butter jars. Not only do they arrive filled with the most delicious (if also rumored to be cancer-causing) substance known to man, but these little plastic wonders, emptied and washed, can be used for anything! It’s amazing! They’re not glass, so they don’t shatter when dropped. Their lids screw on tightly, and they’re made of food-quality plastic, being that they came with food inside. They also come in a variety of sizes -- small all the way up to family-reunion bulk-size jars, for all your storage needs.

You can put buttons in them, or craft projects. They’ll store screws and nuts and bolts and parts you can’t remember what they went to, but you know that as soon as you throw them away you’ll need them. They hold that last bit of paint that’s going to dry up in the bottom of the rusty paint can, and keep the paint fresh so you can actually use it to touch up stuff that needs touching up. So cool. I also use them to store leftovers in the kitchen (food quality, remember), especially in the freezer. Chicken stock, chopped nuts, bulk spices, you name it, there they sit on the freezer shelf, visible and accessible and all at no additional cost!

Today I made an extra large batch of my pie crust mix. It’s the time of year when I start making pies in bulk. The apples are just too good to ignore. I mix the flour and salt and shortening and then I store the mixture in the fridge or the freezer so that I can whip up a single or double pie crust in the amount of time it takes to pre-heat the oven. Sometimes I store the mix in a Ziploc bag (material for another rave, by the way!), and sometimes in a plastic container. Until today, it had never occurred to me to use my trusted PB jars.

It’s actually a little ridiculous to try to explain to you how happy it made me to fill that 64 oz. jumbo-size jar with the mix, label it with my faithful Marks-A-Lot and pop it into the freezer. Sometimes I worry about myself a little, but then I remember my peanut butter jars, and it all somehow seems okay.

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