Bien remuer avant l’utilisation

They moved the peanut butter at Sobeys on Allen Street a few weeks ago. It was just a couple of shelves up, but that I found it as temporarily debilitating as I did reinforced how well-worn the Sobeys aisles have become to me, and what a hair-trigger debilitation threshold I have.

My mother made a casual comment this summer about stirring peanut butter being a good thing; I’d never done this despite the clear call to action on the lid (which I had always dismissed as an ignorable on the plane of “coffee may be hot” and “contents may have settled during shipment”).

But my mother is wise, so I gave it a tentative try, sticking a big spoon deep into a freshly uncorked jar and mucking about. It helped, especially when the dregs, a few weeks later, were less dreggy.

So last week I kicked things up: I emptied the peanut butter from its jar into our immersion blender cup and went to town. The immersion blender was clearly at the edge of its operational limits, but it didn’t conk out, and when I decanted the peanut butter back into a glass jar it was wonderfully smooth. And has continued to be spreadable and luscious in the days since.

Score one for mother-wisdom (and, sometimes, reading labels).