Homemade Anything is always better...especially Butter!

During the past few years I have been plagued by a myriad of digestive issues. For a while, I suspected Celiac Disease (for those of you who don't know, celiac disease is a serious immune response to gluten, a protein found in wheat, barely, rye, etc. It can cause your villi in your intestine to flatten causing mal-absorption and other health issues.), but blood tests ruled it out (although they are not 100% effective, I was going to take it because the thought of trying to live gluten-free was not a fun one). The GI I visited took lots of other blood tests and finally diagnosed me with IBS, which is as far as I'm concerned, a b*llsh*t diagnosis. It seems that IBS is something they say to you when they can't quite figure out why you're having GI symptoms. My husband and I changed over to buying mostly or at least 50% organic foods in an effort to consume fewer chemicals and I picked up In Defense of Food and was completely devouring all the ideas in it. Wouldn't it be healthier just to eat FOOD. Like...real food. Not processed mess, not straight up sugar, not chemicals or hormonally altered crap, just FOOD.

During my last visit to my general practitioner, she suggested that I try cutting soy from my diet because she told me it's actually not the health food everyone claims it to be. I was shocked by this! She was telling me not to eat the almighty soy bean? Whatever...I was willing to try anything. I'm a week into my no-soy diet (and I was eating PLENTY daily) and I am feeling better every day. No more stomach cramps, no more bloating, no more queasiness...just feeling normal. I hadn't felt normal in YEARS!

This revelation brought me to try and incorporate more and more WHOLE foods instead of processed foods into my diet (including white flour, which is indeed a processed food). I'm not perfect, but I can control what I am eating when I'm at home.

A few years earlier, I had mastered the art of making marshmallows at home. I first encountered fancy mallows when I got a peppermint variety around Christmas time from Whole Foods. When Whole Foods ran out of them, I contacted Tiny Trapeze (the company that manufactured them) to ask where I could get more and they never contacted me back. Miffed, I thought to myself; "How hard can it possibly be to make a marshmallow?". The answer was, NOT HARD AT ALL. I've been making my own marshmallows at home since and I have NEVER bought a bag of StayPuffs since as a homemade one is VASTLY SUPERIOR. This got me thinking..."How hard is it to make ANYTHING!?!?"

This day, I wanted to experiment with butter. It's yellow, it's creamy, it's amazing on corn. Surprisingly, this is the recipe for butter:

• Heavy Cream (at least 36% fat)
• Salt (optional)

Yeah. That's it. You don't need a frickin' butter churner. If you're really old skool, you can just shake the cream up in a jar, but I'm not a jar-shakin' kind of gal and why shake, when you've got a Kitchen-Aid? This also works in a food processor. I searched high and low for organic cream with no crap in it...and by crap I mean carrageenan gum, polysorbate 80, hormones, etc. It was hard, but finally I found a cute little bottle at City Feed in JP...made in a farm in New Hampshire, it listed the ingredients as; "Cream". Now we're talkin'.

Now you need to turn on "Whip it" by Devo, because that's what I did. I whipped it. I poured it into the mixer (put the spash guard on) and turned it on high speed.

It whips up into whip cream and then something freaky happens...




It gets all curdled and THEN it starts to seperate (and turn a beautiful yellow). The yellow is BUTTER. The milk is BUTTERMILK. I strained the buttermilk away from the butter and washed the butter and squeezed it thoroughly to get out the remaining buttermilk. I saved the Buttermilk for pancakes tomorrow morning!

And after I cleaned the butter, I kneaded some salt into it (half a teaspoon roughly). I tried a smidge on a dinner knife and the result is...divine. It melts in your mouth, really silky mouthfeel and really, really mild lovely flavor. NOTHING like store-bought butter. I think it will keep for a few weeks in the fridge. It looks lovely, and I can't wait to try it on my corn tonight. Fresh organic butter...DONE.