JUST START WITH PEANUT BUTTER AND IT'S TOUGH TO GO WRONG:

Intermediate Eater: A sweet slice of onion any day (JOHN OWEN, 10/26/05, Seattle POST-INTELLIGENCER

Many years ago, when Emmett Watson and I occupied adjoining desks at this newspaper, we discovered that we shared a passion for Walla Walla onions. And we bemoaned the fact that their season ended about the same time football season began.

And then a friend told Watson how he could extend the shelf life of Walla Wallas. It involved obtaining some old but washed pantyhose. You hung one from a basement clothesline, plopped a large onion into the hose, shoved it down to the toe, tied a knot above it, and then repeated the process.

A month or so later I asked if the experiment was a success.

"Well, I guess you could say it was," Emmett confided. "But I got some strange looks from the furnace repairman." [...]

Sweet onions are terrific raw, on hamburgers. I think they also are terrific on peanut butter and dill pickle sandwiches, but Alice the Artist declares this a symptom of senility. You also could use sweet onions in German kuchen or French onion soup.

If I didn't really love peanut butter, I'd question whether we need two new cookbooks dedicated to the ingredient. Two cookbooks that have nearly identical covers, at that.

But it is peanut butter, after all. And while my own master recipe is no more complicated than eating it by the spoonful, I'm always open to consider new ways to work it into my cooking.

The slimmer of the volumes (though few of these recipes are anything close to slimming) is Lee Zalben's The Peanut Butter & Co. Cookbook, which is drawn from his so-named sandwich shop in New York.

The second is Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough's latest entry in their "ultimate" cookbook series (thus far covering everything from potatoes to brownies), The Ultimate Peanut Butter Book.

Both cover similar ground.

Zalben's book is deliciously illustrated with lush photography. I was particularly won over by the peanut butter and jelly French toast, though peanut butter granola was a close second.

But what really grabbed me was the grilled cheese with peanut butter.

"The idea of a grilled cheese and peanut butter sandwich may not seem very appealing at first," Zalben writes. "But go to almost any vending machine . . . and you'll find little packets of orange, cheese-flavoured sandwich crackers filled with peanut butter and who doesn't love those?"

Weinstein and Scarbrough take a somewhat more serious (and seriously good) approach.