She is dead to me.

The Backstory:
The boy loves Nutella. He’ll sit and read, eating bananas smeared with it. He loves crêpes spread with it – with or without bananas – and I’ve caught him just eating a spoonful of it straight out of the jar.

The Story:
I have a European cookbook (this really is relevant) and the recipes frequently refer to nut nougat. Almond nougat, hazelnut nougat, pistachio nougat – on and on. I thought at first that what they meant was paste, similar to us having almond paste available at Christmas. But the way they were using it that didn’t make sense. I knew it wasn’t nougat as in the stuff with honey and nuts like Montelimar. So what is it? Turns out that making a paste of nuts, sugar and chocolate has been popular there for a very long time. What we call Nutella, they call nougat. Voila! I’ll just use Nutella.

But wait…you can get imported nut nougat. And since I wanted to know if they were vastly different I bought some. And yeah, it’s different. How different? I couldn’t find the jar that I’d bought – that we’d all tried – so I suggested to the boy that as a snack he could have Nutella and bananas, since we had both. He looks at me, with great seriousness and a great deal of passion, (sort of like a 1930’s movie idol tossing a lover aside) “No. Seriously no. Nutella means nothing to me now”.

And here I thought the girl was the only one with a flair for drama.