Life without butter.

Olive oil cookies + a dairy-free life update.

Gianni handed me something, tucked carefully inside a brown gift bag. I took it carefully from his hands. “Per me?” I said. He nodded rapidly. “Si, si, è l’olio di casa mia.” It is oil from my home. A rich and valuable gift from a new friend.

In rural Italy, many homes have a small grove of olive trees or “olivetta” as I’ve heard them called. The olives are gathered and harvested each fall and taken to one of the many local mills that will still press small batches of olive oil for the area’s residents.

During our extended stay in Umbria earlier this year, I spent a month tasting and appreciating olive oil in a new way. Since butter was much more expensive than olive oil at our local Italian market, I delighted in experimenting with the wide range of oils available. It was new—and fun. Unlike butter, which I’ve been making myself for a decade, olive oil remained a somewhat-uncharted territory.

This proved to be providential, as our daughter was diagnosed with a dairy allergy after we arrived back home. “If it’s from a mammary gland, your body interprets it as poison.”

In the moment I felt defeat, thinking of all the effort I’d poured into making sure our dairy was clean and unadulterated, of all those mornings spent over the bucket, hand-milking Sally and Cece day after day. I thought of the fifteen years of homemade cheeses, grass-fed butter, raw cream, and cultured yogurts and kefir.

These are beautiful and wonderful foods for our bodies — if our bodies can tolerate them.

But, if they can’t, we have other beautiful and wonderful foods… like olive oil. I’m humbled and grateful for what I know now.

So where are we, six weeks later? What changes have we made?