Sunbutter

All this time…all those bologna sandwiches…if I had only known about Sunbutter.

My celiac has two children in his grade with life threatening peanut allergies so peanut butter has been largely discouraged as a lunch item for the brown bag set. If a kid has celiac disease, pretty much every day is a brown bag day!

When I sit back and think about all the processed cold cuts he has consumed in his kindergarten through fifth grade experience, it makes me kind of ill. I have even gone out of my way to purchase the purest, nitrate free variety, but still. When I think about all those days when the pantry was under stocked, and I couldn’t resort to a PB & J, I caused much unhappiness by packing a dreaded yogurt instead of a sandwich. Even with the ice pack, a yogurt is runny and gross by lunch hour.

All this time, a great peanut-free, tree nut-free and gluten-free alternative was right there! Sunbutter is a sunflower seed spread that smells just like peanut butter. It doesn’t taste great straight from the jar the way peanut butter does, but it tastes great on bread with jelly!

I packed my celiac a sunbutter and jelly sandwich yesterday and he loved it. He was concerned because it does smell so much like peanut butter but he just told his friends what it is.

Learn more at www.sunbutter.com. Finally, a pantry staple for those in-between grocery shopping days when I am scrambling to put together a palatable, allergen-free, processed meat-free brown bag lunch.

Kendall Egan