Mystery Meat Monday Recipe 1: Peanut Butter Creamy Pie

Our first recipe is Peanut Butter Creamy Pie from a recipe book called "Centennial Cook Book", which was put together by Cheektowaga (NY) Community Baptist Church. It appears to be from 1994. Well, not exactly vintage but it certainly smelled vintage--nice and musty. I guess that's what happens when books spend an unspoken amount of years in the very back of a used bookstore. Here's the book:



The pie certainly wasn't musty. It was amazing!! It had a very rich, smooth peanut buttery taste. This taste contrasted very nicely with the graham cracker crust as well. The filling was also of a pleasingly thick consistency. The best part of this pie besides the taste is that it required very simple, easy to find and cheap ingredients!! It called for cream cheese, peanut butter, vanilla flavoring, milk, powdered sugar, Cook Whip and the graham cracker pie crust. I had a lot of the ingredients already on hand, so all I had to really buy was the cream cheese, Cool Whip, and pie crust. Great deal!



Below is the making process...

Mixing the cream cheese and peanut butter. My measuring cup did not like the peanut butter one bit--it cracked right down the side.





Mixing the rest of the ingredients with the peanut butter and cream cheese. Might I say, that peanut butter and cream cheese together is the ultimate sit on the couch and eat treat--it's much better than ice cream.



Here are all the ingredients mixed together. I don't have a hand mixer at this time, so I had to mix it myself. It was a very thick batter so I ended up with very sore arms!



Spooning the very thick filling into the pie crust. I tried to pour it, but it was too thick to move. It also didn't want to come off the spoon, so I had to take big spoonfuls at once.



Got all the filling in, nice and evenly distributed throughout the crust. Swirled around the pie a few times with my spoon to make it look pretty.



I then put it in the refrigerator for about 4 or 5 hours (that's all my husband and I could stand waiting for it--we are total peanut butter nuts), and it came out gelled pretty solid. The color got a tiny bit darker too.



Ready to serve! I gave myself this special awesome cheese plate that I never get to use otherwise. Be careful when cutting it because the crust is very brittle. This is an awesome recipe to make for work parties or kids birthdays. It's easy to take places, and very quick to make! My pie took me about 15 to 20 minutes to make.

Mystery Meat Monday Retro Recipe Weekly Feature!

Introducing my Mystery Meat Monday Retro Recipe feature! I've got a huge collection of retro homemade cookbooks (the kind with the spiral binding that a lot of churches and organizations put together), and I will be cooking one recipe a week and publishing my results here on my blog! I've also always thought that those kind of cookbooks were like little time capsules and that we're missing out on a lot of tasty food by those recipes still being covered in dust.

My features will have plenty of pictures on the cooking process and a review of how each one tasted when it came out. These reviews will be honest not always flowery and congratulatory :)

Also be warned: I'm going to be choosing some off-the-wall recipes for my feature. Not ALL of them will be out of the ordinary, but many of them will be--what fun is it to keep making the same old thing time after time?

We'll start gently with a homemade take on peanut butter pie for the first week.

Now...ignore the "Monday" part...the recipes are all made on Mondays, but my little guy Cameron (he's almost a year old) doesn't like Mommy on the computer, so I have to find a half hour to steal and post. I will be posting one recipe & review a week, though, guaranteed.

A creamy and easy-to-make peanut butter pie will posted later today!