As I write this I’m eating homemade butter on homemade wheat & buckwheat bread. (What is buckwheat? If you can tell me without Googling it or looking in Wikipedia, you win! I have no idea what buckwheat is. Jessica ground some to put in muffins the other day and there was still some buckwheat flour in the bin when I went to grind reg’lar wheat last Sat’day. I decided to try it, and I haven’t died yet. So I’m eating wheat/buckwheat bread today. Can’t really taste a difference; but it does make the bread a little tougher. Or is that because of something else? Ah, if only I could eat Store Bought Chemistry Set Bread Product from the store! Never tough, never tasty, never goes bad, and you can roll it into sticky little balls that are useful for caulking the bathtub!)

But enough about buckwheat already! This post was supposed to be about our butter. (Which is quite tasty, if somewhat chunkier than the storebought “bread spread”, which we have taken to calling PHVO at our house [for Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, which is what it is.]). (Can anyone suggest how I can avoid using parenthetical statements all the time? [I’m so distractable that I’m always inserting parentheses (which frequently have nothing to do with the subject [which in this case has become so lost that my (parenthetical observations have completely overpowered the post [Parentheses are neat. (You can keep stacking them inside each other [like those little Ukranian dolls (and at the end of the statement [they all unwind at once (like this)])])])])]).

Back to the butter. Since we now get raw milk from the neighbors (someone alert the FDA! Help! Help! I’m engaging in Non-Government-Approved Agricultural Activity!!!), we have plenty ‘nough cream to make bucketloads of butter every week. Last time Jess just gave a quart jar of cream to each child and had them shake it till it butterized, but I don’t see that activity holding its appeal for very long. It will quickly turn into Work. I can just hear the kids now: “Make bed, clean room, throw jammies on floor, practice piano, feed chickens, gather eggs, make butter. Mommmmm! Do I hafta?” So, being the good Dad I am, I called in the aid of the (dramatic music here) Power Mixer. Da da taaaaaa!

Rule Number 1 of making butter with the Power Mixer: Always Put a Lid On First. This is the sad voice of experience.

Rule No. 2: Get the cream out of the fridge first thing in the morning and don’t plan on making butter till sometime after lunch. This is because cream needs to be not cold if you want it to butterize. This is the impatient and frustrated voice of experience.

Rule No. 3: Send a couple of kids all the way down to the end of the driveway without a coat (and preferably toting something fragile) so that Mom will go running out of the kitchen when the cream turns to butter. This is because the butterization happens quickly, and the buttermilk will come spurting out of the holes in the Power Mixer lid, and your wife will be not happy with you when she sees buttermilk on her counter. Buttermilk is great for homemade biscuits. (Not for the Pillsbury Detonating Canister kind. If you add homemade buttermilk to those, the chemical reaction will cause your kitchen to burst into flame.) This is why you must distract your wife first.

Rule No. 4: Rinse butter. If you do not rinse butter with cold water until the water runs clear, the milk stays in the butter and goes rancid. This is icky.

Rule No. 5: Enjoy. It is especially helpful to get bread crumbs and butter globules all over your keyboard. You are not allowed to gloat at the wretched mortals who must eat PHVO on their Pillsbury Remotely-Resembles-Biscuit Food Product, since you yourself were eating PHVO not so long ago.