Butter
Last Friday at work, Emily from sales came in and said, “Hey, you guys? Is it weird if you turn your monitor off and the screen goes white and starts buzzing?”
We all agreed that it was weird. I suggested she unplug the monitor from the PC and the wall, then reconnect it to see what happens. A minute or two later, I headed over to her office to see how she was doing.
She hadn’t gotten far; the monitor was still white. I checked all the connections and reset the monitor. The whiteness went away, but still there was no picture. So I grabbed an old CRT monitor to make sure the PC was actually sending a signal.
“As long as this one works, we’ll know for sure it’s not the computer that’s messed up,” I explained as I plugged in all the cables and the giant old monitor came on. “There! At least your files are safe. It’s either the monitor or the VGA cable, but the cable is built into the monitor, so we can’t really switch that out anyway. If it doesn’t come back to life on its own, you might have to live with this old monster for a while.”
“Thanks for doing this,” said Emily, because she’s very nice.
“Nah, that’s okay,” I replied. “I needed a break.”
As it turns out, troubleshooting computers for the sales department is a hilarious way for a person to take a break.
I can see Emily’s point. In some ways I’m a bigger nerd than advertised, and now Emily from sales knows it.
If there were a culinary version of how much of a nerd I am, it might be that I made butter over the weekend and am about to try to convince you that it’s a spectacular thrill.
Look, I know it’s just butter. All I’m saying is that fresh butter tastes better than regular store-bought butter. And it doesn’t have a single preservative or suspicious ingredient to its name. And you hardly have to do anything to make it. Am I saying I’m going to make butter on the regular from now on? Hell no. But if I’m going to have buttered toast, or buttered, um, bread, or… er, I guess bread about covers it, but if I’m going to butter any kind of bread for immediate consumption, I now know that this is the only way to do it.
How to make your own butter:
- Pour cream into the bowl of a mixer and turn the mixer on.
- The cream will first thicken, then become stiff whipped cream, then become lumpy whipped cream, and then suddenly it’ll separate from the buttermilk and it’ll be butter. You don’t have to watch if you don’t want to. You can go do something else and you’ll still get butter. But it is cool to see. Anyway, once it’s butter, turn off the mixer. You know without my telling you that you have to turn the mixer off, but if I leave out “turn off the mixer,” this recipe will only have two steps.
- Squeeze as much of the buttermilk out as you can, then wrap the butter in cheesecloth and hang it up to drip for about half an hour.
How to make fresh butter into the most delicious butter you’ve ever tasted:
- Peel, slice and smash 3 cloves of fresh garlic.
- With a spoon, mix the garlic, about a teaspoon of kosher salt, a dash of oregano and a little fresh-ground black pepper into the soft, fully-drained butter.
- Crap, now this recipe only has two steps. Uh, put the butter in a dish.
Do it once and you’ll know I’m not crazy. Oh, and if you were riveted by my monitor story, you probably can’t wait to learn that I’ve since figured out that the power supply is toast.
I wish it were, anyway, because then I could enjoy it with amazing homemade butter.
