This month’s “Country Kitchen” is a bit of a break from the norm. This one is all about peanuts, and it features some fantastic peanutty recipes from the wives of Alabama’s U.S. senators and representatives.

Earlier this year, these congressional wives teamed up with the Alabama Peanut Producers Association and the Alabama chapter of the March of Dimes to produce a brochure about peanuts and healthy babies. Specifically, the brochure heralds peanuts as an excellent source of folic acid, a B vitamin that helps prevent certain birth defects of the brain and spinal cord.

That comes as super news for women of childbearing age. That, with a nutritionally sound diet, they can help ensure their babies will be born healthy is wonderful. That peanuts and peanut butter are a key part of that diet is icing on the cake.

Besides being good for you, peanuts are just flat-out delicious. Great raw, boiled, roasted or parched, and absolutely unbeatable in cookies, candies and desserts, peanuts and products made from them are among life’s finer offerings.

Incidentally, if you’re always looking for a reason to indulge in peanut butter, this is the perfect time, because November is National Peanut Butter Lovers’ Month. This year’s observance marks the 105th birthday of America’s favorite food.

For the peanut/folic acid brochure, Alabama’s nine congressional spouses contributed their families’ favorite peanut recipes, and all are wonderful. In case you don’t run across a brochure, we’re passing those recipes along to you through the “Country Kitchen.”

They’re coming your way just in time for the holiday baking and candy-making tradition, too. For extra-special gifts, greet friends and neighbors with loaves of Peanut Butter Banana Bread or festive bags filled with goodies like homemade Peanut Brittle and heavenly Haystacks. And for that special dessert at a holiday gathering, wow the guests with Alabama Peanut Butter White Chocolate Coconut Cake. It’s the ultimate.