Saturday, November 18, 2017

Moving to Italy: Peanut Butter



On one of our rare trips to the city of Casale Monferrato, we finally found two food links to our life in California: a bag of peanuts at the open market, and breakfast cereal in a high-end grocery store. Even though the children had been enjoying Nutella, I had missed giving them peanut butter—guaranteed protein without all that sugar. Since the doctor had recently pulled the children off chocolate, we found the peanuts in Casale at just the right time. While we were there, we went to the appliance store and bought a blender from our limited funds so we could make peanut butter. 

The day after our trip to Casale, the sun was bright and strong in the sky, and we adults spent the day seeking shade or a breeze to ease the hot humid weight that seemed to rest on us.  The electricians had worked all morning on the wiring for the central heating, so the power had been intermittent, but when they left for their two-hour lunch, I decided to try out the new blender. 


Before this, I had never needed to make peanut butter. Why bother when it was available at our local grocery store? When we found the bag of peanuts, I figured all we had to do was to shell them, throw them in the blender, and grind. 

Paul and James and the twins gathered around the kitchen table to join the grand experiment. I placed a handful of peanuts in front of each child then showed them how to crack the shells and place the nuts into a bowl. At first they were very helpful, cracking and popping them into the bowl, and cracking and sneaking them into their mouths. Later, the twins became bored and climbed down from the table—Matthew to ride his tractor, and Margaret Ann to play with her dolls. After a while, Paul wandered off outside to play with Simona. Only James persisted.

When we had a good pile of peanuts in the bowl, James helped me pour them into the new blender. I assumed that with few minutes of grinding: Voila! Peanut butter. The theory was sound, but the result was thick and sticky. I added vegetable oil to thin it out and salt for flavor. James and I added and tasted, then added and tasted some more. I had to add a great deal of both oil and salt to make it spread easily and taste good. With their use of super blenders to grind the nuts into a fine paste, I doubted that commercial peanut butter was made with so much oil, but it was the only way I could approximate the texture. Even after all that blending, it never did get smooth enough to be called “creamy,” so I accepted that it would be “crunchy”. Despite warnings of the choking hazards of nuts in my copy of Dr. Spock’s baby book, we accepted the chunks. It wasn’t as good as the jar my sister eventually sent from the States, but it was good enough.

The next day we awoke to a gray, gloomy sky, but everything was cheerful inside as I poured a bowl of breakfast cereal for Paul and James—the first since our arrival in Italy. Then Margaret Ann and Matthew clamored for the same thing. Because it was imported, and expensive, we could get it only in a larger city like Casale. The locals would not pay out that kind of money for breakfast, but to us it tasted like the grandest treat, even though we had only been able to find Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies. In California the boys had long ago turned up their noses at such blandness, but in Italy both cereals seemed exotic and appealing, much more so than the Italian breakfast: a small hard roll with milky coffee. We still gravitated to familiar tastes.


Most of the odd problems we encountered in Italy were minor, but they reminded us we were not in our own environment. Adapting became a struggle when even minor problems meant we had to start from scratch, figuring out how to proceed. Old habits, old customs, and old assumptions had to be discarded and new ones constructed. For George and me, the inconveniences would have been next to nothing, but the children complicated everything exponentially. Like most parents, as our lives settled into a rhythm in our new home, the children’s well-being remained our primary focus.



The story of our move to Italy starts with "Arrival" on the June 26, 2017 blog post.
 

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