Tired and happy
I should be in bed.
I should have been in bed hours ago.
I have to go to work tomorrow morning at midnight - sucks to be me.
But I came home and grilled myself some wild boar, leek and apricot sausages. I've slathered them in homemade dijon & tarragon mayonnaise. Norah Jones is singing Turn Me On. It's raining gently.
"Like a flower waiting to bloom
like a lightbulb in a dark room
I'm just sittin' here, waiting for you
to come on home and turn me on."
Norah's voice is chocolate to my pain au; the mellow strains are like melted Normandy butter running down my chin.
I'm a butter snob. I'm a food snob in general, but I'm a butter snob in specific.
I have Fleur de Sel de Mer Buerre de Bretagne butter for my scones. I have cheesy Normandy butter, made by ripening the cream while warm with cheese cultures, for my pain au chocolate. I have Fife Creamery Butter - a sweet cream butter - from across the Firth of Forth, for melting on seafood. I fry in Derrygold (Irish), make noisette and meunière butter from Presidente (French), which I also slide under the skin of a whole chicken before baking. I spread only Stichell butter-with-no-name on my bread.
How can it be both Stichell and butter-with-no-name? I call it Stichell because Mrs. Stichell makes it from the milk of her Jerseys up in Aberdeenshire; I buy it twice monthly at the Edinburgh Farmer's Market. It comes wrapped in cellophane with a paper label with the ingredients: cream, salt.
Butter. Healthier than any other spread - I knew it all along. I always said that butter was better for you; modern science only just recently managed to prove what my body knew all along. Real cream is better for you than Cool Whip®. Butter is better than margarine.
And that's how Norah sounds: like butter.
Comments
Nice...My best friend back home was commenting once (it was shortly after our revered FDA announced that bacon was not, in fact, meat but fat) that her three favorite foods are fats: bacon, butter and doughnuts (donuts?). I really enjoyed the butter essay! Brought me back to better butter times...ah....
Posted by: Violetta | June 25, 2004 7:41 AM
PS: Nice new blog template. Looks...urban chic.
Posted by: Violetta | June 25, 2004 7:42 AM
COOL WHIP is disgusting!!!!! Like margarine, I guess.
Yes, I like the new template, too. I went looking how to do it once long ago and couldn't figure it out.
Posted by: Mara | June 25, 2004 8:34 AM
YUCK!!!!!
Cool Whip and Margarine are disgusting. I won't even bring myself to eat either. I'm sure they'll make your body glow in the dark years after you're dead. And you won't even decompose. Same think with Twinkies and Maraschino cherries. Yuckedy yuck. Did you ever hear how Margarine is ">made? that'll cure ya. I read in a health magazine that the residue from heating the oil and cooling it back down and reheating it etc. when making margarine is this thick black gunk that looks like motor oil. ewwwwwwwwwww.......
Posted by: Violetta | June 25, 2004 8:54 AM
Yes, margarine and Cool Whip are disgusting; they are also cheaper. Economics rule. Now that Daddy and I are more or less alone, I don't buy margerine anymore. Daddy still does from time to time. He seems to not notice the taste difference and the money matters to him. But the other thing I have noticed is that we use way less butter than we used to. Yes, moderation. As we try to eat more healthily, we just use less. And it tastes as good.
Nae, do you remember the butter in the Falklands? Mine was a bit cheesey, and I liked it that way. I could have made it daily for the fresh taste, but I wasn't that organized, with two small kids. And the buttermilk. I used to have to fight you for that. I wanted to use it for baking and you wanted to drink it. You were so disappointed when we came back and had 'cultured' buttermilk. Not at all the same. Sort of like cream and sour cream. Both have their places, but they are different.
Posted by: Maman | June 25, 2004 3:46 PM
Hey, Maman! I remember standing in front of the chair in the kitchen wearing this grey & blue jumper while you took these things that looked like wooden spoons with ridges on them, and you were smacking the butter back and forth, back and forth, and I just wanted the buttermilk, and you just kept saying: "Not yet! Not yet!"
You can make butter that has the "fresh taste" (sweet cream butter), by pasteurizing the cream and then making the butter in a cold room. If you don't do it that way, there's a pretty good chance that the lactic cultures will sour the butter, making it taste cheesy, which is really good for some things.
The template is Rahmat's design; at the moment, I've just completely ripped him off and am learning how to adjust it. It's a cascading style sheet, and there will be instructions, but today I have to go and buy a tent.
Posted by: Nathan Dornbrook | June 26, 2004 12:09 PM
Nae,
when I come we can make butter/cheese? I went and got my passport today! It should arrive in early August. Plenty of time for a visit in mid-August:)
Posted by: Rachael | June 29, 2004 2:47 AM
Can we make butter? You betcha!
There's SO MUCH to do - August in Edinburgh is a bit crazy. The population quintuples, there's several thousand plays and shows on...well, okay, there's about three thousand, which is really only a few thousand, not several thousand. Still, there's live music everywhere, street theatre, opera, high culture theatre, comedy - Edinburgh turns into a strange place in August, a strange and wonderful place.
Posted by: Nathan Dornbrook | June 29, 2004 6:18 AM
A decidely ADHD place in August.
Posted by: Maman | July 8, 2004 1:59 PM