28 Days of Recipes: Grandma's PB & J Squares

Last week, my grandmother turned 98 years old!  She's still hanging in there!  Granted she is 98 and not exactly running marathons, but she gets around alright, remembers who most people are, and is healthier than most 98-year-olds I know (probably because I don't know any).  She's still giving nurses aids a hard time, solving the world's problems, hitting on my boyfriend ("well, aren't you a tall, masculine person!"), and threatening to raise a little hell at the nursing home.

When I was a wee little pain in the arse, my favorite snack was pretty much anything Grandma-made, but more specifically today's recipe.  So, in honor of my rockin, hilarious, ancient, and culinary talented grandmother, I've made this:

Peanut Butter and Jelly Squares

This is a pretty straight forward recipe.  I hesitate to even really call it a recipe because its basically peanut butter and jelly on toast.  But I went completely by the book on this one, and did things exactly the way my grandma did while counter-height me was standing by watching and drooling.  If you wanna be cool like my grandma, you need these things:

That is rye bread (by my frequent request), peanut butter, red current jelly, unsalted butter, and frilly toothpicks.

If you make this and you decide to leave out an ingredient, it damn well better not be the frilly toothpicks.  These are the most essential part of this dish, and there's no substitute for frilly toothpicks.  Don't be a total lame-o square loser - pay the extra $1 for the frills.  Or I'll hunt you down.

Also, it won't taste as good, because fun is an ingredient too!

So first, you do this painfully obvious step.

And then, for some reason, my highly disagreeable camera decided to fail at taking a picture of me buttering the bread.  But I have to mention it, because most people overlook this step.  It seems weird, and I'm not exactly sure why it was so integral, but trust me, it was.  The first thing she did with the bread out of the toaster was butter it, before putting anything else on it.  I'm guessing because extra calories mean extra flavor, and even if I'm wrong, I'm not one to argue with that logic.

Once you've buttered your bread, the next step is to make it look like this.

Which is pretty easy, and if you need me to tell you how to spread peanut butter and jelly on a piece of toast, you're reading the wrong blog.

Now, brace yourselves, because we're not done here.  These pieces of bread are large and rectangular, not square, and most certainly not bite sized.  What you need to do next is cut them into squares, and stick a frilly toothpick in each one.  If you do it right...it will look like this.

I promise I'm not geometrically challenged, and I do realize that some of those are indeed bite sized rectangles.  I'm calling for a free pass on the grounds that I'm not a grandma yet, and I didn't take the extra few minutes to cut the crust off the bread, because crust is yummy and I am lazy.

But really, shapes don't matter.  These are fun.  And colorful.  And polygonal.  And whether you're 3 or 90, they're delicious.  Just remember to put your teeth in.

See?!