Homemade butter.

I am so excited!  I read a while back that you can make butter yourself fairly easily.  I don't like buying butter because either it isn't organic or it is REALLY expensive.  And I go through so much butter with all of the baking I do, so this has been a concern that I should have addressed before. To be honest, I didn't really believe butter would be easy to make by hand because it just seems like one of those things that can't possibly be easy to make, which is supported in my mind by the whole historical image of a maiden churning butter for hours on end.  Regardless, last weekend I decided to tempt fate and bought two half litre bottles of whipping cream, knowing full well that I would not be able to use it all in my baking for the week, so I would have lots leftover and have to use it somehow.  So I deliberately set myself up to have to deal with it this weekend.  So today was the day.

Thankfully, Tim helped me because I was actually a little nervous.  I had read extensively online about the process of making butter at home and knew that there is a bit of a sudden change that you have to be ready for, otherwise you may end up spraying chunks of butter everywhere.  I'll explain.

Extra buttermilk.

Tim and I returned home after grocery shopping for a fun morning of baking and preparing foods for the week.  I bought a fairly large carton of buttermilk yesterday because there were no smaller sizes, so I knew I would have a lot of buttermilk to use up, so most of the foods I prepared incorporate it somehow.  I made a small batch of buttermilk waffle batter and Tim made the waffles and then I started preparing the foods for the week that we would need.  I made Tim loads of both lemonade and some pure limeade (the many bottles on the right side of the shelf, our small army of juices):

For the limeade I combined the juice of three limes with 1/3 cup of sugar and three cups of water.

I then made our salad dressings for the week: noosh (nutritional yeast) dressing for me and ranch for Tim, and of course stored them in our 1/2 litre glass milk bottles: