HERE WE ARE again with Herb’s Cooking for One, the show where we cook things guys like to eat. I’m Al, filling in for Herb, who’s starting to get some of his hair back, at least in spots, so things are really coming along there.

Today we’re going to make something a lot of guys like to have for lunch. It’s called peanut butter and jelly, and I’ll bet your mom used to make it for you. But some guys don’t live with their moms anymore, so I’m going to show you how you can make it for yourself. It gets a bit tricky in places, so pay attention. I don’t want any letters from personal-injury attorneys like I got when I showed you how to make chocolate milk, okay? So here we go.

Now, the first thing you need is some bread. Normal bread comes in slices like these right here, but if you’re not careful you can end up with bread where they’ve stuck all the slices together with glue or something, so it’s like just one big lump of bread. I was over at my fancy-pants sister’s house the other day, and she had bread like that, and she had to use a knife to get the slices apart. I said, Why don’t they just leave the slices apart in the first place, instead of sticking them together like that? She looked at me like I was crazy. Women, huh? They always make everything ten times more complicated than it has to be.

So we have our peanut butter over here, and our jelly over here, and there’s a reason for that, so pay attention. Now, you see how I’m putting these two slices of bread side by side like this? That’s cause the peanut butter goes on the right side, and the jelly goes on the left side. That’s what my mother taught me, and that’s what I believe. You don’t want to get your peanut butter on the left like some sort of commie pinko Islamofascist liberal atheist nazi Mormon. So you take your knife—I mean the dull kind you find in the silverware drawer, not the sharp kind, cause if your wife is like mine she won’t even tell you where the sharp ones are anymore—and you stick it in the jar and come out with some peanut butter. And then you sort of smear it all over the bread, like this. It’s sort of like laying bricks, except you don’t want to lay bricks with peanut butter, cause I can tell you from experience that doesn’t work.

Then we do the jelly. Some people say they can get the jelly out of the jar with a knife, too, but I never can. It always slides off. I mean, maybe if you’re a brain surgeon you can do that, but what I always do is turn the jar over above the bread and bang it like this until some comes out. I just keep banging it like this, and some more, and—well, there, that was most of the jar, but that’s all right cause I like jelly.

So now you’ve got your peanut butter on the right and your jelly on the left, and I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Which side does the mayonnaise go on?” Well, obviously it goes on the right. I mean, that’s way easier than trying to make it stick to a great big pile of jelly.

Well, that’s all we have time for right now, so you’re just going to have to figure out how to put the halves together yourselves. Keep those cards and letters coming for Herb, and I want you to know his nurse reads every single one of them, although she doesn’t understand them very well unless they’re in Ukrainian. Until next time, this is Al, saying what Herb always says, which is, “Remember, cooking is for guys, too.”