1:
If you add a little yogurt with a high bacterial content to the open bowl of 35% cream you've left on your counter for six or seven hours then you can actually reverse the pasteurization process to some degree. The reason for doing this is that when you finally get around to churning the cream (at 12:30 on a Saturday night) what you will end up with is cultured butter, as opposed to just regular butter. What is the difference between cultured butter and regular butter?
Cultured butter tastes better. It tastes like butter, but it has more subtle rich flavours because of all the extra bacterial goodness in it. It is common in Europe but not common (and consequently difficult to find) in North America. Cultured butter also churns a lot faster and reliably, which is nice for me because my last few attempts with uncultured butter turned into disasters and I couldn't get the buttermilk to separate from the butter and it was annoying.
I think what I was making before was clotted cream, not butter…or that is to say I was only making butter successfully 50% of the times I tired. But now it's all good. Good and delicious. Clotted cream is also delicious, but it rots faster than I can eat it, whereas properly made butter can keep quite a while in the fridge.
I'm writing this even though most everyone I tell that I make my own butter thinks it's weird or gross. Like I said, I've also made my own cheese. This year I've also made strawberry, blackberry and blueberry jam, a red pepper chutney that is technically a pepper jelly with spices, a batch of pickled asparagus, pickled radish, pickled carrots (two batches, one last winter and one this summer) and, most recently, a batch of dill pickles.
Dill pickles are, as you know, the holy grail of the pickling arts and I'm excited to see how these ones turn out. Update in a couple of months!
2:
My cat ate two bowls of cat food today and playfully captured a large moth and then killed it on the carpet. This was surprising because my cat is very old and can hardly walk and hasn't appeared playful, or eaten an entire bowl of food in ages...like more than a year or two. She mostly sleeps and when she's awake she makes this kind of deathly meowling sound that has become famous among my visitors and house guests. L dR M has even taken to locking the cat out of the bedroom at night (and I can't say I blame her) because the deathly meowling isn't conducive to sleep.
According to my sister, my grandmother used to be the same way. When my grandmother came to visit, she would always sleep in my sister's room and my sister would hear her in the night saying stuff like: "I'm dying. I'm dying. This is it, I can feel it coming now!" But she didn't die, of course, on any of those nights and so, instead she would start ordering my sister to go downstairs and get a pack of cigarettes so she (my grandmother, that is) could have a smoke in bed. Apparently this was mortifying to my sister, but I was in the next room and slept through the whole thing.
3:
One thing I realised when I was at burningman a few years back (and I'm sure I've mentioned this before somewhere) is that if you practise really hard at playing bongos and if the stars align for you in just the right way, you may one day end up in a drum circle in the middle of the desert beside a fire that's like two hundred feet high and that is creating crazy dust tornados everywhere and you may be surrounded by a whole lot of naked people who are dancing and gyrating to the beat you are paying while a whole lot of other sympathetic souls are putting burning plants in your lips and pouring unknown glasses of mysterious liquid down your throat so that you don't have to take your hands off the drum.
To a lesser degree, but for some reason just as rewarding, are the strides I've made recently in my banjo playing. For example, I was walking down the street with my banjo a couple of days ago and this guy stopped and asked for a song and then after I played one he stuffed 10$ in my pocked and walked off.
Plus, I sat in on an oldtime music circle for the first time this week (is was stressful and fast and crazy, but totally fun) and I learned that, as long as you keep sitting on the stage and playing the songs, the bartender will keep bringing you pints of beer.
And, tonight, there I was sitting on my stoop playing cluck ol hen and a guy came by, listened to me, then went to the store and bought me a can of (Bitburger) beer. See, everybody and their mother can play the guitar, but the banjo is
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