Homemade Butter and Buttermilk

When I was five I was a member of a Brownie troop. We were kind of like the Girl Scouts only smaller; we wore brown dresses and sashes with badges stitched on them. We learned how to cross stitch, we sang at the Senior Center, and our troop leader taught us valuable life skills like what poison ivy looked like. The Brownie troop meeting that I remember the most fondly is the time that we made butter in a mason jar. We sat in a circle singing songs and giggling while taking turns passing a jar of cream and shaking. While each girl shook the jar to the beat of the song the rest of us patiently watched and waited our turn until the jar quit making a gentle swishing sound and started making a plopping sound. I can still recall the looks on the other girl's faces when the sound changed and our troop leader revealed that it was time to open the jar and see what we had made. We eagerly watched our troop leader drain out the buttermilk, wash the butter clean, and begin to mix in herbs and spices that she had sitting up on the counter. When it was time to taste our troop leader provided us with an assortment of crackers and breads to taste the different variations of butter that we had made. I can remember dramatically rolling my eyes back in my head when I tasted the butter because it was absolutely the best thing I had ever tasted in my whole life.

Last week, I decided to share this life experience with my daughter. We substituted our high speed blender for the circle of jar shaking Brownies and to my delight she was still as amazed as I was at how the whole process works. We used one pint of organic, non-gmo heavy cream from Straus farms  which yielded about a cup of the best tasting butter that we have ever had. We had fun getting messy when we drained the butter and had an even better time rolling our eyes up into the back of our heads when we tasted it.  The homemade butter has been a welcomed accompaniment to our g-free breakfast bagels this week and has even been the star in a batch of buttered pasta for lunch. Have you ever made your own butter?

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