It is worth every penny.
Run, don't walk. Stock up before the stores run out. It's gold, people. Pure gold.
Before we left for Brazil, I knew they didn't sell good 'ole American peanut butter in the stores here, and wasn't too concerned. I didn't stock my suitcase with jars of Jiffy, knowing that I could withstand nine months without a PB & J sandwich. But then I saw raw peanuts for sale and learned from Googling homemade peanut butter that it was a cinch to make.
Not.
A.
Cinch.
Turns out it's easy if you have pre-roasted peanuts without their skins. I'll give them that. But I didn't see any naked ones available and I spent an entire afternoon trying to get those persnickety little wrappers off these precious protein packets. It's the kind of task you wouldn't mind doing for the full afternoon if you were chewing on a wheat stalk, sitting on the porch with Maw and Paw and Jimmy Carter, discussing affordable housing and the weather.
But, deeply Southern though we are right now, I had no such afternoon. I tried various techniques for making those blasted skins just "slip right off." (Be warned, dear readers - the freezer technique does not work. I'm just telling you now, so you can use the freezer space in your generous North American freezers for things like Ben & Jerry's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream.) Blanching in boiling water worked better, and the skins came off more easily. But I still had to individually slip each blessed nut from it's slippery jacket.
Each.
Blessed.
Nut.
Luckily a few podcasts of This American Life and The Writers' Almanac kept me from tossing the whole bowl on to the merry people strolling through craft fair downstairs.
The next step, roasting, was easy, and produced a large platter of gleaming nutty gems. Finally, some gratificaiton. I then attempted to blend the nuts with various ingredients to get a consistency even remotely resembling that of store-bought peanut butter. I would have been happy to settle for the hard-as-a-rock, oil-on-top health-store variety that you have to mix yourself, ending up with an oozy mess all over the counter. That would have been dreamy. Instead, I kept adding honey, oil, butter -- anything to make this mixture stick together. 
In the end, I got a tub and a half of tasty (hey, it's hard to go too wrong with honey, butter, oil and nuts) but not exactly spread-able peanut...stuff (can't really call it butter).
I have to say, I thought I was pretty media-savvy and had fairly astute judgement about what to trust, and what not to trust, on the internet. I had no idea I'd be led so wrongly astray by peanut stripping techniques and simple recipes that require fewer ingredients than one of my now-withered hands. Furthermore, many of these recipes were on frugal-living web sites.
They.
Are.
Nuts.
Hey, I'm all for DIY as much as the next Readymade mag reader who thinks knitting cozies for coffee cups is cool, but this is simply not a frugal use of time. My time would be better spent on Etrade or busking outside for the 4-ish hours it took to produce a tub of this concoction. And writing the blog about it, of course.
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