Cookies and Butter

It's very bad to go for 2 weeks without posting because then all the things I was going to post about, I didn't post which leads to a meandering and pointless update.

I've been cooking again with a little more joy. Last Friday, not the 25th but the 18th, was a great day. I sat outside and wrote for 5 hours, picked up Z from school, and made cookies. Oatmeal cookies. I haven't made cookies in ten years because I can't eat fewer than four at a time. But now I'm pregnant so four seems like a reasonable number of cookies to eat. Plus, they're filled with all that nutritious oatmeal and butter. Friday the 18th was a great day. Then, things went down hill with a trip to Sedona's Apple Fest where, upon arrival, we learned all the apple blossoms had frozen the spring before. So it was really more like a sell-your-jewelry-in-a-stall fest. And I didn't need any jewelry. Then, other lame and annoying things happened like a complaint about workshop comments, three meetings on Wednesday, a rejection on a manuscript and a meeting on a Friday morning. Dumb week.

But this weekend, things began to improve. Speaking of butter. Erik and Zoe and I made butter in a Nalgene container (BPA's be damned) yesterday. We took some whipping cream and a marble and shook. And by we, I mean mostly Erik. Zoe hit herself in the head. I lost muscle interest early. Then, when we couldn't hear the marble anymore, we poured out the "butter." Erik was like, this is just whipping cream. He also wondered why we didn't use the Kitchen Aid. We knew it could make whipping cream. He also thought this was going to be the most expensive butter ever made ($3 for Horizon's Organic Cream). Or rather the most expensive whipping cream. The whipping cream tasted good but it wasn't butter. I investigated on the internets what went wrong and discovered that you shake the cream until you can't hear the marble any more. Then, you're halfway done (that's the whipping cream). You keep shaking until you can hear the marble again. Then, the butter has separated from the milk. You pour off the buttermilk and then wash the butter. Erik admitted that it was super fun and that the butter tasted good. All half a cup of it. It's not cost-effective but the process leaves you with the feeling of self-sufficiency. I'd like to think that if the end of the world were upon us, and if I had a cow, I could make earth's most precious resource with the aid of a Nalgene bottle, a marble, and Erik's willingness to shake.