Peanut Butter Torte

In the battle of clean vs. not-so-clean, where do you draw the line? I think, as people grow more conscious of waste, in both economic and ecological senses, this line gets a little blurry. What's clean, and what's not so clean. It's an interesting conundrum, and I think I've started to ponder it more and more as I think about my family and Dudley's family, how we are similar, and how we're different. For example, Dr. M finally, after almost thirty years, hit paydirt and found "good bread" in Houston. He has to stalk the bakery because it really only sells to businesses, but Dr. M is relentless when it comes to son pain (he really always refers to bread as pain). So, after several phone calls and then just showing up at the bakery -- really the man has no shame -- he struck a deal with the baker that he could have bread but he could only pick it up once a week, and he had to order multiple loaves. As we all understand, bread is really best within a few hours of being baked; so, to keep the bread at it's best, Dr. M comes home and wraps all but one loaf of the bread in freezer paper and stores it in the freezer. Then, any time he might have need for pain with dinner, he unwraps a loaf, briefly runs it under the faucet, and revives the frozen bread in a hot oven (this trick is FANTASTIC for frozen bread!). The other night I was doing the dishes and, out of the corner of my eye, I watched Dr. M very quietly go outside, shake out the freezer paper that night's bread was wrapped in, and fold it up to use it again. Now, that is SO something Dr. M would do. The man is thrifty as the day is long, and lordy how he loves to reuse things. Plastic bags, freezer paper, you name it. Dr. M has done the ecofriendly thing long before it was hip or cool to do so just because he has a deep-seated hatred of wastefulness. Ergo, convenience products that are touted for use-and-toss purposes (think paper towels, plastic bags, etc) try Dr. M's patience.

This is all fine and dandy, but I think Mrs. M and I tend to take a more middle-of-the-road approach. It's fine to reuse things, but you have to draw the line somewhere. Dr. M reused a freezer bag for the leftover Christmas ham, and when I took it out of the freezer it was, to put it mildly, a mess. And then I morphed from the jovial Singleton in the Kitchen to the shrill fishwife -- holy crap sometimes Dr. M's desire to reuse everything under the sun for fear of squandering a penny kills me. On the other hand, you're definitely a product of your environment, and Dr. M's "waste not, want not" philosophy is definitely part of me.

It took Dudley to make me realize that, much to my chagrin in this case, Dr. M's thrift has definitely rubbed off on me. Dudley hails from a "more is more" upbringing, and I have never seen anyone have a more passionate relationship with a roll of paper towels and a bottle of bleach spray than my fiancé. I'm told, though, that Dudley's dad's (Mr. H) relationship with the same is matched by none. And I'm pretty sure Mr. H would feel lightheaded, to say the least, if he watched my dad shake out the freezer paper and fold it up for another use. As for me, plastic bags with holes make me mad, but the freezer paper is just very funny. And reusing it isn't hurting anyone . . . until I open the cupboard and folds of freezer paper, combined with aluminum foil that's been saved for another use, start to tumble out. Then we have a problem. I do think it will be interesting to see how Dudley and I manage to reconcile these different points of view. Here's to hoping I win; though, the outlook really isn't that great. In the five years Dudley and I have dated I have yet to break him of his single-minded devotion to paper towels.

As for this Peanut Butter Torte, well, if we can't agree on paper towels and germs, at least we can agree on this dessert. I made this dessert (it was a TWD pick almost two years ago!) for Dudley's birthday celebration when he was in Houston a couple of weeks ago. This torte has been on my hit list for at least a year or so, but I never managed to coordinate my dessert needs with the time this torte needs to set properly. When I started talking about Dudley's birthday dinner with Mrs. M I knew I wanted to make this for him. Dudley loves peanut butter and chocolate, he loves cheesecake, and this dessert has his name written all over it. I thought it might be a fairly labor intensive dessert, but really, aside from the cooling/setting time, it's fairly quick and painless. The only change I made to the recipe was to use Nabisco's Famous Chocolate Wafers rather than Oreos because I didn't feel like going to multiple grocery stores to get everything I needed that day. 

Dudley enjoyed the peanut butter torte, and he was still talking about it when he got back to DC after the long weekend. Everyone else seemed to enjoy it, and when we got back from California that weekend there was just one slice left. That's a sure sign of success, but what is it about the last piece? No one ever seems to take it in my family. As for me, I liked the dessert but I didn't love it. Then again, I don't like cheesecake, and the peanut butter mousse has enough cream cheese in it to give a hint of cheesecake. It was a perfect ending to the birthday dinner, and that was the beginning of a great weekend. 

We made it out of an icy Houston to get to sunny California to discuss wedding plans that weekend!

 We tasted wine for the wedding. It's a tough job but someone's gotta do it!

And had a fantastic dinner at Ad Hoc. More on that later . . .

 We even got to replenish Dr. M's bread stash with bread from Bouchon.

Ooooh, and the recipe for the Peanut Butter Torte? You can find it in Dorie Greenspan's book Baking From My Home to Yours; you know it's worth every single penny. You can also find a very nice post about this torte with a printable recipe at Annie's Eats. The English major in me just has a really hard time reprinting recipes without permission. Y'all know I like to follow the rules!