Would choosy moms choose these recipes?

Brand name cookbooks are often the most fun because they force recipe writers to be creative and cram the product into every conceivable type of recipe. That's how we get chocolate cake recipes that call for tomato soup or sauerkraut. (I once lived near a sauerkraut factory, so in my neighborhood the chocolate cake recipe was more popular than it had any right to be. Being reassured that a sauerkraut-containing chocolate cake didn't taste any different from other cakes, even if it was a little stringy, did nothing to convince me that it was worth trying.)

This is me taking the long route to say that today's post is from the Jif Choosy Mothers' Peanut Butter Cookbook. It's from 1979 and was free with the purchase of Jif. It's a great book considering it was free-- lots of color pictures, 50 pages, even a correctly-placed apostrophe in the title! There are plenty of delicious-looking cookies, brownies, and sundaes, but the writers had to get a little... creative... for some of the other recipes. This brings me to:

Yes, it is an unusual appetizer. It's basically a cheeseball held together with peanut butter instead of cream cheese, and two tablespoons of taco sauce is enough to make it "Mexican" in this world. You're not even supposed to roll it in cilantro. The taco sauce is as far as Jif is willing to go to make this Mexican. You will roll it in snipped parsley, thank you very much.

And yes, the title could not sound less appetizing. I am tempted to make approximately 768 disgusting juvenile jokes about the title, but you're already thinking them anyway, so I will leave you to it.

If you must know what a Mexican Peanut Log looks like, feast your eyes on this:

It is on the left, whistling softly and trying very hard to pretend that it is totally normal to be composed of cheese, peanut butter, taco sauce, and parsley. It secretly hopes the weird creature on the right will draw more attention.

What is that weird creature?

They've already used "unusual appetizer," so the writers give up on the description entirely. The picture is in the front cover if you want some idea of what you're getting yourself into if you make this.

It actually sounds pretty good-- mushrooms cooked in butter, cream cheese, bacon. The peanut butter, however, is obviously there because it is obligatory. It's afraid people will catch on and just leave the Jif out. And that's exactly what the choosy moms who wanted to pass on the family tradition of heart disease did.