A Buttery Tale

One day I was contemplating, how hard it is, these days to find anything genuinely healthy in the stores. Everything seems to have additives one probably doesn't want in it.   How nice it would be to be able to get raw butter, I mused.  I've never seen it sold and even if it was sold, it would probably be very, very expensive.  Woe is to us, those trying to find something trully nutritious to feed our families:)  So imagine my excitement when one day a friend of mine told me about a local source of raw milk, which wasn't much more expensive than its' ultrapasteurized kin.  And being that we were trying to reintroduce some dairy into our lives, becasue my allergic child no longer reacted to milk that someone was ingesting next to him, I decided to get some.  But, back to the butter.  There I was, despondently browsing through the Nourishing Traditions  cookbook, thinking that many of the suggested wonder foods would remain a fantasy as far as I was concerned, when a thought struck me.  Wait a second, butter is made from cream, and my non-homogenized raw milk has a lovely layer of cream on top, I have some recycled glass jars with screw on tops in the house and I vaguely recalled reading about a preschool activity of shaking cream in a ziplock bag to make butter.  So a desire to try this out was born.  I found this recipe with instructions and so tonight I made butter.  It worked, it came out beautiful in all its yellow buttery glory, the left over buttermilk was delicious and I think the kids will be very excited to try this tomorrow and to help make it themselves in the future.  So here is one delicious, quick, scientific, frugal and practical activity to try.  I highly recommend it and you don't need to get a churn ( my 8.5 year old inquired if I had one, when I announced my intentions to try this experiment, I guess he remembered from the Little House books).