Sweet cream butter

Nobody in the family has felt much like cooking since the electric stove went out. It seems to be a lot of trouble to either cook on the wood stove or dig out the electric skillet or the roasting pan.

But, that's really not a problem, because thanks to the sweet little Dexter cow in the picture, we have lots of butter! Buttered potatoes, buttered sweet potatoes, buttered vegetables... mmm, yumm!

On our farm, we each have the type of milk we prefer for cereal, coffee, hot cocoa, yogurt, pudding and cheese. In fact, our fridge is often about half-full of milk. When someone asked if we milked our sheep and I said that it wasn't worth the trouble, she must have thought I was nuts. I really should have explained that we already milk one cow and four goats. And it is hard enough keeping those two types of milk straight.

Lena's been out of town for a few days, so I've been milking everybody. It's not really that hard to keep track of - the cow gets milked into a plastic ice cream pail (I know plastic is not good, but Sweetie (the cow) hates the sound of milk squirting into metal) and the goats get milked into a proper stainless steel milk pail.

When the milk comes into the house, it gets strained and goes into containers to cool. The goat's milk is all mine, so it goes into plastic pitchers. The cow's milk goes into glass jars, which are easy to scoop cream out of. Lots of cream, sweet cream.

And about every three days Lena makes a batch of sweet, creamy butter. Life is good!

Hmm, this post started out to be about the irony of raising our own milk, making our own butter by hand and yet cooking all of our food in the microwave... that thread got lost somewhere, didn't it?