I was thinking of America and early memories of tastes associated with it. I thought of peanut butter. The big jar of Jif Peanut Butter that my aunt brought from America was a novelty to me in Chennai, India. It was the early nineties, and I remember spreading a generous amount of peanut butter on bread for breakfast and licking the spoon clean before heading to school. I would then look forward to the evenings when I could have more. As a child, I liked eating groundnuts (another name for peanut, Arachis hypogea) dry roasted in sand in a cast iron pan by vendors in the beach by the Bay of Bengal, or when steamed and served with the shell at home. So, I could relate to the taste of peanut butter although it was lusciously different. Now, as I considered celebrating my early memories of American food, I decided to cook something that was familiar in taste yet something new just like my introduction to peanut butter.
