As much as I love food (it’s my soulmate), and regardless of the fact that I’ll never have time to taste every recipe I’ll ever want to taste (sad but true), I have, nevertheless, eaten the exact same food for breakfast nearly every single day for approximately five years.

Ok, maybe it’s not the most photogenic food, but it’s my favorite thing.  It’s my desert island food.  It’s one half of an Ezekiel English muffin with freshly ground almond butter.  

Every day.

I don’t know how to start the day without it.

So here’s what happened…

My Royal Taste Tester (RTT) kindly and generously agreed to give up some of his time to perform our grocery shopping errand this week!  Imagine my good fortune!

And then… as is often the case, RTT systematically excluded one item from the list.  Only one.  Everything else was impeccably selected and accounted for.  And do you know how much almond butter remained in our home?  (Refer to the picture above – approximately 1/6 of my English muffin is covered in store-bought almond butter. That’s how much.)

What to do?  Ok… so they make it in the store in this giant grinder. I could probably do the same thing, right?

I dumped every almond I had into my Ninja blender… and then I blended the snot out of them.

Hm.  The results were… dusty.

I have successfully created almond flour?  Ok, so I’m going to try to make this moister by adding some oil.  But what kind?  I have extra virgin olive, canola, sesame, coconut…

I selected the olive…

Back to the blender we went!  More blending!!  Just keep blending!  And now… we have something of a spreadable consistency.  This is a start!

Not as creamy as the store-bought stuff.  And not as dark… What’s the difference?  I have no idea. Should I have roasted the almonds first?

And if eaten straight out of the container with a spoon, it kind of has an olive flavor.  Oops.  Should have chosen more wisely?  Ok, the final test – how will it taste on my English muffin?

I’m labeling it a success!!  I shall make it effectively through the week with my breakfast of champions instead of melting into a helpless heap of despair on the kitchen floor each morning this week.

If you want to make almond butter the same way, don’t let me stop you.  Or you can Google it (which I didn’t) and find a better way.  Here’s what I did:

Homemade Almond Butter

• 1 c raw almonds
• 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Blend like crazy.

Happy Wednesday!  Hope you’ve prepared an adequate breakfast to get you through the day.

xo – the llama