In praise of peanut butter

Let us all sing songs in praise of peanut butter. Besides being the almost perfect food (unless you are allergic to peanuts, of course), peanut butter is a very good cleaner for some sticky items. Actually it is probably the peanut oil that is the cleaner, but we are more likely to have jars of peanut butter than peanut oil sitting around the house. So let's just talk about the cleaning properties of peanut butter. If you have a glass object with a sticky mess left on it from a sales sticker or a label, you can rub peanut butter on it and it will remove the sticky mess. Then you just wash the item in hot, soapy water, or put it in the dishwasher. Peanut butter will remove tar and other nasty sticky things from hands and other items. When we went camping recently, one child said, "What's this, Mommy?" and showed me hands and arms covered with pine gum or pine sap. I washed him with soap and water, but he was still sticky. "Use peanut butter," said Daddy. I didn't have any peanut butter, but I did have a leftover peanut butter sandwich. I opened the sandwich, rubbed it all over the little boy's arms and hands, washed him all off, and the pine gum was gone. What is even better, is that the peanut butter used in cleaning can be old, generic, rancid, non-organic, and cheap. We keep a jar of this stuff under the kitchen sink just to be used for cleaning.