Brown Butter Baby

BROWN BUTTER BABY

I used to despise peanut butter. I mean it's a food that can choke you even if you're taking time to chew and not talking while you eat. Call me old fashioned and crazy but the idea of asphyxiation by mashed peanuts, as you try to swallow them, never appealed to me. But it wasn't just the fear of death that kept me at bay of the brown mushy mess. It was also the taste and texture which I imagined to be the same as a mouth full of poo. Thankfully, I could only imagine this since I never had a mouth full of poo and had no inclination to do the research to prove my theory.

As much as I once hated peanut butter I now enjoy it in a myriad of ways; I spread it on toast, slather it on bananas, smooth it on apples, smear it on rice cakes with raisins, or slosh it into smoothies. My previously reluctant palate now delights in the earthy taste of natural, unadulterated, raw peanuts smashed to smithereens. There is one condition to my conversion. The peanut butter I partake of must be packaged in a jar with a label that reads "Ingredients: peanuts only". But had it not been for something monumental that happened in my life I would have never given peanut butter a second (or even a first) glance. What happened was I became pregnant.

When I was growing up old black women in the south where I'm from had a lot to say about cravings during pregnancy and what they meant. The gist of one of those sayings was that the mother will crave whatever baby decides it needs to grow and develop into a healthy newborn specimen. I never thought one way or the other about it and disregarded this as an old wives' tale along with other superstitions that found their way to my curious ears back then. However, my experience of going from total disdain to utter enjoyment of peanut butter suggests the possibility that those old wives weren't telling tales.

My son was born a beautiful, healthy bouncy baby weighing in at 9lbs and 23 inches long. As a young mom I found it amusing that the kid was nearly 2 feet tall at birth! He's an adult now and both he and I are regular consumers of peanut butter. I believe it very well could have been the magic that transpires between expecting mothers and their unborn children that instigated those cravings in me. For those entire nine months I obsessed over making sure I was eating only the best, the purest, most natural foods with the least amount of preservatives and other additives. I guess you could say loving the baby in my belly is how I learned to love peanut butter in my belly too -- plain and simple, no additives, just love.