PB & Jammin' Sandwich Mysteriously Not Findable on the Web

PB&J and slight variations of the abbreviation are conventions to mean peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a food item going back over 100 years, according to "11 things you didn't know about peanut butter & jelly".

What's mysterious to me is that I've been unable to unearth "PB & Jammin' Sandwich" online for recipe title or for the recipe ingredients. Including quotation marks in my search doesn't significantly increase prospective hits. Furthermore, the online prospective recipes that I did view don't call for the hardcopy recipe ingredients of peanut butter, jelly, bread, and Libby's pumpkin. (The "PB & Jammin' Sandwich" hardcopy recipe was in a coupon pack a few weeks ago and also in a supermarket freebie magazine more recently.) Yet, only by adding "pumpkin" to the search field do the search results improve somewhat.

The three following sandwich recipes list bread, peanut butter, pumpkin, and bananas for ingredients, but no jelly.

• "Thank You Very Much" Pumpkin Peanut Butter Sandwich
• Pumpkin Peanut Butter Sandwich
• Kid Friendly Recipes Pumpkin and Peanut Butter Sandwich (This recipe also adds cinnamon.)

Adding "jelly".to my Google search does not yield useful hits. Nor does adding "HEB" or "Libby's". Searching through recipes pages for Libby's and also HEB's do not yield any recipe pages for the peanut butter and jelly with pumpkin sandwich. What gives? Why is this hardcopy recipe not findable on the web?

The hardcopy recipe pages for both coupon pack and HEB magazine call for peanut butter, Libby's pumpkin, jelly, and bread. The preparation is the same—mix half each of peanut butter and pumpkin, then spread the mixture and jelly onto bread slices.

How appealing could such a sandwich be? Would you prepare and eat one? Prepare it for family? Contrasting the promo blurbs for the recipes, would people warm up to subbing half the peanut butter in a PB&J sandwich with pumpkin, whether canned or not?

Blurb from coupon pack recipe:

When you add LIBBY's 100% Pure Pumpkin to PB&J, you get a sandwich that's delicious, nutritious and filling. The kids won't even taste the difference, and you'll feel good knowing that they're getting protein with nearly half the fat.

Blurb from HEB freebie magazine:

Serve a better PB&J. This delicious and nutritious lunchtime makeover delivers essentials like protein and fruit. And for something a little different, try the pumpkin-peanut butter spread on celery or tortillas.

In the first blurb—"The kids won't even taste the difference", the statement indicates to me that if the "kids" know that the peanut butter is not ALL peanut butter, they might not bite. The second blurb touts deliciousness, nutrition, protein, and fruit. This statement looks to be an appeal targeted to grownups.

Now channel the kid: How appealing does this sandwich sound? Pumpkin AND peanut butter with jelly? Besides the odd combination, which I have not found online, the preparation is at least a smidge more complicated than just scooping and spreading peanut butter. A preparer actually needs to measure and mix these two ingredients before spreading, using additional kitchen implements!

For those who really want to mix their peanut butter with pumpkin, visit "8 Ways to Get Your Pumpkin-Peanut Butter Fix". If you insist on trying the PB&J and pumpkin sandwich recipe, click either or both recipes that I've mentioned (from coupon pack, from HEB magazine).

Bon appetit!

Wanted Unholed Lotta Bagel

The first time I'd become aware of bagels was about the early 90s. Oh, I'd encountered "bagels and lox" in books occasionally, but never gave them much thought. Seems when I read about them and saw pictures, they mystified me. They looked like doughnuts. Sometime shortly thereafter, I bought one. I ate it as though it were a doughnut. Hmmm. Kinda plain, not sweet. (Hadn't thought about the lox; thought cream cheese sounded icky.)

Over the years, I'd eat them in spurts. Sometimes a co-worker would bring in a box of them, accompanied with little containers of specialty cream cheeses. I really liked the salmon-flavored ones, also the jalapeno ones. Now I've finally settled into eating them mostly toasted, with a layer of butter.

I sometimes wondered about bagel denseness contrasted with store bread. Whenever I occasionally bought bagels at bagel stores, the stores tended not to list caloric information. Maybe I was too much into the out-of-sight-out-of-mind mode to bother looking up nutritional information.

In any case, bagels have become another bread aisle staple, in the same area as loaf bread, buns, and English muffins, with something called sandwich rounds starting to make appearances. Not long after I started to add bagels to the weekly shopping list, I looked at the nutrition table. Wow! 300 calories! That's about the same amount of calories as four slices of bread! Now, my days of eating one whole bagel (or more) at a time are gone, hopefully not to return.

The other day as I started the butter smear on my toasted half bagel, it crystalized in my brain that the hole in the middle makes the smearing inconvenient. I then thought about other times I'd thought about bagels and their holes. Bagel shops sell sandwiches on bagels. Occasionally, I'd bought bagels that had almost no hole. (I attributed the condition to the bagel dough preparer using a small ring to cut the dough instead of using a big one.) Most times, holes seemed to be about an inch in diameter.

I had thought using a bagel absent a hole at all would make a better sandwich than using a bagel where you need to be artful with the spreader; otherwise, condiments fall through. Also, if you're going to eat bites that have bread for each bite, it seems odd to run into breadless bites. The spreading care is even more crucial if buttering or creamcheesing a toasted bagel.

Why do bagels have holes? According to answerbag.com, the serious answer is that the holes allow thorough cooking of the bagels. "History of the Bagel: The Hole Story" has some history of the bagel in addition to details about the hole. Googling keywords "bagels no holes" yields numerous results. Closely related to why holes is how to make them. I ran across three ways to make them, none of which involve use of a cooky cutter device as I originally thought might be the case.

From baking911.com—

Hole in the Middle Method: From a ball shape, moisten your finger with water and poke your index finger through the center to form the hole. Moisten your finger with water, if necessary to smooth and to reshape the sides. Pull gently to enlarge hole.

The Hole Around the Finger Method: Flatten the ball of dough slightly into a disk shape, folding the bottom edge under and smoothing it until it looks like a doughnut shape. Make a hole in the center of the circle from the bottom up and twirl around your index finger to widen the hole. Reshape the round into a doughnut shape.

The Tube Around the Palm of the Hand Method: To form the bagels, take each piece of dough and roll it into a ball. Flatten the ball, then fold it in half, sealing the edges with your fingertips. Then fold again to form a tight cylinder. Roll the dough into a tube about 9 inches long. Wrap this piece around the palm of your hand, overlapping the dough about 2 inches. Pinch the ends together to form a ring. I like this way because it is quite fast.

Besides explicit information about shaping bagel dough to make the holes, Baking911.com has lots of detailed background and techniques throughout the stages of bagel making—even a q/a section. A passage that had caught my eye was "Boil on each side, about 3 minutes or less at a time, turning with a slotted spoon or skimmer. When done, the bagel will be puffy and the center will be nearly closed." Soooo, it's possible commercial bagels might have larger holes than necessary (or for my taste, anyway. ).

Well, after having poked around some sites to find out why bagels have holes and also reading the methodologies, maybe I'll settle for the normalcy of most bagels having approximately 3/4" diameter holes. OTOH, it seems possible that homemade ones might yield almost-closed-hole results.

I have listed some promising recipes that use breadmaking machines. My criteria for recipes tend to be calls for few items and ease of the process. (Look in my blog index for any title that has "convenient" in it, then visit articles. The fewer the ingredients, the better, I say.)

http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/1180/Breadmaker-Bagels129588.shtml
Lists 6 ingredients. Features a calculator for adjusting recipe ingredient amounts to numbers of servings.

http://www.recipezaar.com/recipe/Basic-Bagel-For-the-Bread-Machine-55609
Lists 5 ingredients for the bagels, 2 additional for egg wash substitute for Pam-type spray. Also includes recipes for bagel sticks and chips.

http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=5812.0
Lists 5 ingredients, accompanied by numerous comments.