sunday butter

A week of brutally early mornings and long long days dumped me into the weekend. All I wanted were long indulgent brunches and empty days to offset the fast-computer-deadlines compressing my brain. So I:

Ordered lemon gingerbread pancakes at our favorite restaurant down the street. Took a blustery beach walk with the dog. Made butter. Weeded the garden. Ended Sunday in the bathtub with a glass of rose. Victory! A weekend of supreme satisfaction.

Here's the butter drill, from this gorgeous and inspiring book that I want to crawl inside of and live every page. I did feel a slight tinge of cheating as I made this in the food processor, but I got over it pretty quickly. I used the best cream available to non-farmers in San Francisco: Straus Family Creamery.

As the instructions said, it whipped up quick and thick and I almost abandoned the project to find a pile of fresh strawberries. It took a little longer than I thought, but it finally separated into butter! and buttermilk. It looks a little pukey at this stage, but do you believe it?

I even rinsed it as the directions told me, like the butter was a precious sweater. This apparently helps the butter keep longer. Just add ice water, whirl it around in the processor, rinse and keep repeating until the water loses its milkiness.

Finally, I slathered some over a piece of french bread and packed the rest into a jar. Our Puritan ancestors might roll in their graves that this only took 15 minutes, but they'd probably have the same flush of awe.