I’m loving Endless Simmer, a food blog I started reading last year in part because their Friday Fuck Ups category - some of those posts bear an uncomfortable resemblance to some of my forays in the kitchen. Yeah. Let’s just move past that.

Amusingly, this mostly DC-based collection of bloggers includes one blogger who spent her formative years in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. We have one of those, too. I wonder if their’s has that whole fetishistic relationship with scrapple? Hmmm.

When I stumbled across a video last week that showed a technique for making butter with a stand mixer,  I couldn’t get the thought of it out of my head.  Could it really be as easy as it looked to turn simple cream into butter?  I had to find out.

I had a vision of making rich, sweet, golden butter.  Butter is the best.  And if you’re like me and of a certain age, you remember when butter was considered pure saturated evil.  Hydrogenated oil was sold to our mothers as a superior alternative to butter.  Parkay hid behind things and argued the identity of the “buttery” spread on the bread, unrelentingly burping its own name from the lips of its tub over and over.  Imperial crowned kids all over the country.  America ate it up.  And so did I, t least until the 1990s, when I discovered the superior creamy goodness of the real deal.

The white beast that stands in my kitchen doesn’t get used as much as I would like, so any excuse to bring it out is welcomed.   And after thinking about it for a week, then talking about it at brunch, I decided to try it on Easter Sunday.    Here is the result:

Making butter….is that what the kids are calling it?

There’s something very satisfying about making something like butter  or bread  or cheese yourself.   For the butter, a stand mixer, cream, ice water, and about 20 minutes are all you need.    The result is the freshest, cleanest-tasting, rich and creamy butter I think I’ve ever had.

Is it worth the little bit of trouble and mess?  Oh, yes, most definitely.   Give it a shot.

How can we resist a blog with a title like The Maltese Bacon? As if the title isn’t awesome enough, blogger Michele Nguyen posts great pictures and has a fun post up about eating bún bò Hu? (Husband’s favorite) at a restaurant in Eden Center.

Eden Center deserves it’s own post, so I’ll save that for another day.

Washingtonian Magazine’s Best Bites blog just listed their 2009 Foodie In and Out List. We note that “haute BLTs” and Cassoulet are in and truffled mac and cheese and “haute grilled cheese” are out. This will affirm the preferences of the other meat-bloggers, but I’m just hoping the Cheesetique’s bar doesn’t get wind of this silly idea and mess with their menu, because that would make me sad.