We hunted everywhere for a nut chopper--the kind my aunt used when she was baking petit fortunes in San Fernando, Pampanga. It was a glass vessel with a four-blade mechanism that one manually moved up and down to dice the nuts within into hundreds of small pieces.

After I described it to Aubrey, she said, "Why should we have to do that, Grandpa? All we have to do is put the nuts in the blender."