Free Miss Matched by Shawn K. Stout Page B

used to.
    When Milo finished, Fiona looked quickly at the clock and then at Mr. Bland. He was headed inthe direction of the Job Center, and by the time he reached it, Fiona had all of her fingers crossed.
    Mr. Bland reached into the first bucket and said something, but Fiona’s heart was beating so loud in her ears, she couldn’t tell what.
    He reached into the second, and then the third. Fiona wanted to stick her fingers in her ears to quiet her heart, but she didn’t dare uncross them.
    Finally, he got to the electrician bucket. Fiona repeated her name, at first to herself, and then out loud and over top of her thumping heart. Mr. Bland took a gazillion years to unfold the piece of paper and she tried really hard not to leap out of her chair.
    Then, finally, Mr. Bland looked right at Fiona. Her heart stopped making noise as he sighed. Then he shook his head and said, “Extraordinary.”
    And she knew it flat-out was.

The True L-O-V-E Story of How Peanut Butter Met Jelly by Fiona Finkelstein

    P eanut butter was invented in 1890. A doctor in St. Louis, Missouri, made peanut paste for his patients with bad teeth who couldn’t chew meat. Peanuts have a lot of protein in them, kind of like meat, but peanut butter is a lot easier to chew.
    This doctor went up to George A. Bayle Jr., who owned a food company, and asked him to package his peanut paste. Mr. Bayle must have thought that was a pretty good idea, because he started sellingpeanut butter out of barrels for about six cents a pound. Can you imagine a whole barrel of peanut butter for just six pennies?
    A few years later, another doctor named John Harvey Kellogg and his brother, W. K. Kellogg, got into the peanut butter business and got a patent in 1895 for the “Process of Preparing Nut Meal.”
    The first nut cookbook, called The Complete Guide to Nut Cookery , came out in 1899.
    As for jelly . . . people have been eating jelly in America for hundreds of years. Colonials in the 1600s even used jelly as icing for cakes.
    Nobody knows for sure when peanut butter and jelly first met. But some people think it happened during World War II. American soldiers ate a lot of peanut butter. And everybody knows that eating a lot of peanut butter can be a good thing if you like peanut butter. But after eating it for a gazillion days, it can get kind of old. So some people believe that American soldiers added jelly to their peanutbutter to make it taste better. When the war ended and the soldiers came home, peanut butter and jelly was a big hit!
    Now peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are in school cafeterias, on menus at restaurants, and in vending machines. There’s even a peanut butter and jelly sandwich eating contest and a peanut-butter-and-jelly-of-the-month club!
    Maybe it’s because jelly is so sweet. Or maybe it’s because peanut butter is just flat-out nutty. Who knows? But it’s just like Mrs. Miltenberger says: They are a match made in sandwich heaven.
    Here are some other peanut butter and jelly facts:
    1:  It takes about 540 peanuts to make one 12-ounce jar of peanut butter.
    2:  In September 2002, the world’s largest peanut butter and jelly sandwich was made. Itweighed 900 pounds and contained 350 pounds of peanut butter and 144 pounds of jelly.
    3:  Ninety-six percent of people spread the peanut butter on the bread first, and then the jelly.
    4:  The average child will eat about 1,500 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before finishing high school.
    5:  The most common jelly used is grape (which is okay, but my favorite is crab apple). The second most common is strawberry.
    There are lots of foods that you might think would be good together, but matchmaking is a lot harder than it looks. Believe me. Tune in next time to find out how spaghetti met meatballs. Well, I’ll tell you this: They didn’t meet at the movies, that’s for sure.

Acknowledgments
    T hanks go to my husband, Andy,