I can’t believe it’s just butter

We made butter this week.

Not intentionally, unfortunately.  Elizabeth was whipping cream to grace the strawberries we spent last Saturday picking, and I popped into the kitchen to check on things.

“How’s the whipped cream look?” Elizabeth asked me.  I peered into the mixer bowl and deemed the cream still unwhipped.  “Needs a few more minutes,” I replied, and cranked the mixer to its highest setting and sent it on its merry way.

Turns out there’s a very fine line there between whipped cream and whipped butter.  We crossed that line, and not in a timid or exploratory way.  No, we launched across it, riding on rocket-powered dune buggies with air raid sirens strapped to their roll cages.  When I came back into the kitchen, we had a gooey glob of butter thrashing about in a sickly looking bath of buttermilk.

All’s well that ends well, I suppose.  I bolted out to grab another carton of whipped cream while Elizabeth pressed the butter, and for breakfast the next morning we had buttermilk pancakes with strawberries, whipped cream, and homemade butter.

I figure that fact that it was homemade counteracts all the usual health issues generally associated with butter — or whipped cream, for that matter.

photo credit: Robert S. Donovan