Peanut Butter Heaven

As a child growing up in Malaysia, I would read a lot of American comic books. I loved Archie and Dennis that Menace and, of course, the Peanuts. On TV, there was The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family, giving the world and idyllic look inside the idealised American family - and the world lapped it up, together with all the icons of American pop culture. Although I lived thousands of miles away in an Asian culture, I knew all about skateboards, backyards, baseball, bubblegum — and the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The kids in these comics and TV shows seemed to love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that to me, it seemed like a bizarre concoction.

We could get peanut butter from the supermarkets in Kuala Lumpur — it would be the Planters brand, with a cartoon peanut dressed up as a dashing gentleman, I think. My mother would make us peanut butter sandwiches with a sprinkling of crunchy white sugar on top — the best kind of sugar would be the ones with the large crystals! But we never had jelly on top. We could not imagine what jelly would be like in a sandwich. After all, jelly is the cold stuff that you make with gelatine and flavoured water in the fridge. It has a strange rubbery texture and is eaten as a dessert or at birthday parties. I must have been a strange child because I never liked jelly — I didn’t like the rubbery sweetness or the way that melted in my mouth will stop so the idea that it was somehow yummy spread on peanut butter was very alien to me.

It was only later that I learnt that “jelly” is an Americanism for what we in the rest of the English-speaking world call “jam”. Even so, it seemed to me a very strange and un-appetising combination. So I was never tempted to pull out the jar of jam whenever I went to the cupboard to get a peanut butter.

Later in life, being health-conscious, I would only have the occasional peanut butter sandwich — this time, minus the sugar and only spread thinly on top of one slice of bread. It was tasty but nothing to get excited about.

However, since I started running recently, I have been absolutely starving a lot of the time. And for some reason, the only thing that seems to satisfy my craving is a peanut butter and jam sandwich. I have no idea how that combination suddenly popped into my consciousness again after all these years but something in my taste buds or my desperate stomach made me rummage around for some jam. The only flavour we had in the house was raspberry and I spread a thick layer over an equally thick layer of crunchy organic peanut butter on my slice of toast…

And it was to die for!

So now, I am wondering why I am not managing to lose any weight in spite of running about 10 miles week. Do you think that these peanut butter and jam sandwiches might have something to do with it?

Photo: thanks to meganmillscrm from flickr.com (CCL)