Today seems like a good day to hide in the kitchen.
I just finished making the butter you see in the lower right corner of the image. When I mentioned on Twitter than I was headed into the kitchen to prepare handmade butter, I received a number of comments saying I’d taken the DIY a little too far (Thanks, Dmitri–love you too 
) . But homemade butter isn’t fancy or hard to make! All you need is:
+ 2 cups (1 pint) heavy whipping cream, chilled (I splurged on fancy cream from the Pike Place Market dairy)
+ Pinch salt
And a glass mason jar with a good lid, which you should chill in the freezer or fridge for a little while prior to filling it with the cream and a marble (or something else small and food-safe to use as an agitator–I used a little plastic egg). As a kid, when I made butter at home with my mom, we used an antique glass churn with a mess of gears attached to wooden paddles that’s been in the family for 150 years, but a jar works fine. 
Take out every ounce of loneliness, aggression, and sheer unbridled hatred you possess on your cold, cruel jar of cream (read: shake that bastard). After 15-25 minutes of bashing that cream about, you’ll find it has become chunky and buttery. If your cream refuses to cooperate, you can finish the churning process in a blender (I set mine on “stir” and “low” and it literally took two good pulses to create butter action).
Once you have solid and liquid, strain the liquid off, which is tasty buttermilk (see my measuring cup in the photo) that you can drink or save in the fridge for baking. Then, pour cold water over the solid so it’s covered, and drain it off through a strainer. You’ll want to keep doing this until you get clear water as result of straining the butter.
After your butter has had a bath, press all of the remaining liquid out of it with a wooden spoon (any buttermilk left behind can go rancid and ruin it), add salt and/or spices (I recommend various kinds of sea salt, chives, dill, garlic, curry, etc.) and pack it into a container. Chill that sucker in the fridge and serve it on fresh bread. SO GOOD.
[Heirloom tomato came from the Local Roots Farm CSA. I'm not a big tomato fan but it was just too pretty not to photograph.]
[...] Homemade Butter!?! Can we, at the Darrington Tiny House-of-Chaos make our own butter? I bake bread, but butter too?!? Oh, heaven: From Libby at ExoSkeleton Caberet: [...]