Peanut Butter Coconut Oil Yummies

About the same time I got serious about cutting out wheat and sticking to a more real-food-type diet I also began ingesting coconut oil. The downside of this is that I don't know which endeavor is producing which positive benefit. But no worries, I'll just keep doing them both!

I think it is so sad that we have been told that fat is evil and that it has been sucked out of so many products, rendering them less filling and less tasteful - this is unnecessary and I believe unhealthy deprivation, although I do not know what the best route is if you eat a lot of processed carbs. I can only speak from my experience that on a good-carb (nonstarchy veggies and meat) diet, fat does not make you fat! Fat fills us up and keeps our metabolism running smoothly.

This is a good blog post from a good paleo blog that explains it well.

I began my coconut oil journey with some Virgin Coconut Oil from one of my favorite companies, Vitacost.com. They have nothing to do with my mentioning them, I just love their service, prices and products. If you want to take a look, click through with this link and you and I can both save $10 if you place an order.

Or just go to Vitacost.com and take it from there. I like that they have a comment system so you can see others' opinions on different products and they have free shipping if you spend $49 or $25 on Vitacost brand productts.

Anyway, their coconut oil is good. But if you don't like coconut, it might be too overpowering a flavor. It was for me at first. So I purchased Spectrum Refined Coconut Oil at my local grocery store (Kroger). Our Walmart has it as well. The refined oil does not have the coconut taste. Their web site declares it has been tested and has all the benefits of the unrefined - I hope this is true!

What I do is mix the refined with the nonrefined and it tones the coconut taste down and I'm beginning to like the coconut flavor now. I've also just used the unrefined and it tastes fine with the peanut butter. The refined is also good to cook with as some dishes may not taste quite right with a coconut flavor.

You can google coconut oil and find many links that expound on the benefits of this amazing fat. It has a long shelf life and does not need to be refrigerated, though in the summer mine stayed melted in our warm house, so for certain recipes, I put it in the fridge until it got a bit solid. In the winter it stays solid on the shelf here as we keep it cool. Coconutoil.com is a good place to start as well as a book called The Coconut Miracle by Bruce Fife. You can click on the "Look Inside" feature on Amazon and read quite a bit there.

There are some amazing stories about coconut oil helping people with Alzheimer's disease and any number of other maladies. Many people add it to smoothies and some make "fat bombs" with it. You can also replace butter in recipes with it or cook your morning eggs in it. I love butter so I prefer to cook with that. I get my dose in by making little peanut butter tartlets, and these are easy to tweak to your liking.

This is how mine look when I make them. Not especially pretty but practical!

There is no set recipe but I will just say what I did for this batch -

1/3 cup coconut oil (I used a mixture of refined and virgin and it works best if it is a soft solid)
1/3 cup peanut butter (almond butter would be yummy too)
your favorite sweetener to taste - they are great with honey, but I usually use stevia powder
optional - a few dashes of cinammon, a few drops of vanilla extract and/or melted chocolate poured on top.

Just stir everything together until fairly smooth and taste for sweetness. You will probably have tiny chunks of coconut oil but that is fine. Then I place silicone cupcake liners in a container and spoon the liquidy mixture in. Glad makes small snack containers with lids I use sometimes as well. Put in fridge until they set. They soften up quickly around the edges, so I usually eat them with a spoon. They are quite yummy to me! One little tartlet and I am full for hours.

If you feel like cheating with the sugar a little bit, they are extra delicious with Peanut Butter & Co. White Chocolate Wonderful peanut butter! I believe it has 10 grams of carb for 2 tablespoons but also has a bit of fiber and you are halving your amount with coconut oil.

They make a Dark Chocolate peanut butter too but I haven't tried it with that yet. I can find this at our Super Target, Walmart and the two main grocery stores I go to. At this point I eat about two tablespoons of coconut oil a day (would eat about twice that if the budget wasn't so tight), and I am losing weight for the first time in a long time. This may be due to dropping wheat instead or maybe both, who knows! But I recommend doing some research and seeing if you think it might be worth a try. I cannot express how much better I feel after starting on grain free and adding coconut oil. I want to tell the world to try it!!