Tuesday, June 01, 2010

bread and butter

We are officially finished with our second year of homeschool. And we have a full week of summer break under our belts (which included a homeschool conference for me), so I figured it was time to get back to blogging.

I bought The River Cottage Family Cookbook a while back and quickly fell in love with the photos and recipes. However, I am just now getting around to using it. I feel like I have made something out of it already but can find no written documentation of that, so apparently I am crazy. This afternoon I was craving bread but didn't want to bother with kneading. I have no-knead recipes, but they require that the bread "sit" for a bit before baking and I had no time for such nonsense. The recipe for soda bread in this book was exactly what I needed. And I decided that the perfect partner for the bread was homemade butter. And wouldn't you know, just 18 pages over in the very same book, were instructions for just that. Perfect.

Here is the cream waiting to become butter and the soda bread ready for the oven...
For the butter you pour heavy cream into a mason jar and shake away until butter magically appears. Larkin, Lucy and I passed the jar around and each shook it for a bit. It was so amazing how quickly the butter forms (less than ten minutes for us). Here is the butter still sitting in the buttermilk...
You then pour off the buttermilk and rinse the butter several times with cold water and then squeeze out the remaining buttermilk and your butter is ready. It is that simple!
The soda bread is delicious and the butter is perfect! This was such a simple treat for us to enjoy this afternoon. The butter was so much fun it makes me want to buy a churn. Seriously.

4 comments:

kristi said...

yum! this makes me want to use my cookbook. you are the reason i bought it. :)

mary anna said...

You know I could eat all that bread and butter by myself! I probably would not even feel badly about it!!! Growing up we made our butter that way but it was from milk straight from the cow! It is amazing how it forms but I remember it seemed to take a long time and arms became tired!

sew nancy said...

yum!
we have made butter before but not this way. i'll have to give it a shake:)

Anonymous said...

Congrats on your first year! This was our first year homeschooling as well, though we don't do a lot of early academics so it was mostly arts, stories, poems and fun. Summer is a nice break though, isn't it? I'm feeling the itch to plan for next year.

Thanks for visiting my blog. I hope your strawberries were enjoyed, one way or another!

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...