Butter.

Today's post is about butter.

Despite the popularity of butter, very little is actually known about it, and scientists often refer to it as "The Delicious Mystery." People have been making butter for centuries using a process discovered by accident in 1528 by Gabriel Silas, an elderly baker with Parkinson's disease*. Gabriel was making a batch of his famous Soggy Cake and realized that he didn't have enough milk to make it properly soggy. He walked over to his neighbor's house and borrowed a cup of milk, but in the 2 mile journey back to his bakery, something peculiar happened. When he opened the container, he saw that some of the milk had magically transformed into a paste-like substance. Upon tasting it, Gabriel discovered that it was quite good. Using his new discovery, Gabriel went on to invent the croissant.

Today butter is made in large factories by robots with robot-Parkinson's disease**. But even though hundreds of gallons of butter are made every year, we still cannot scientifically explain what causes the cream to turn into butter.


This is a gallon of unprocessed milk. We have been getting organic unprocessed milk from a local dairy farmer.

The first step in the butter-making process is to allow the cream to separate from the milk. If you click on the picture to enlarge it you can kind of make out where the cream ends and the milk begins.

This is an action shot. The blurred hand and arm indicate movement.

The next step is to agitate the milk. In layman's terms, this is known as "Shaking It Like A Polaroid Picture". The milk needs to be agitated for about thirty minutes, which is why most television shows are thirty minutes long.

Once the milk has been properly agitated, globules of butter begin to form.


And finally, the miracle of butter has come again. Butter can be spread on toast, used in baking, or even deep-fat fried and eaten in chunks. It is also an excellent stain remover. The next time you do a load of laundry, try throwing a stick of butter in during the first spin cycle!***

* Andrea didn't want me to make jokes about Parkinson's, so don't let that joke reflect poorly on her.

** Yeah, Andrea didn't like that one either.

*** Everybody knows that a joke, right? Please don't put butter in your laundry.

Pomegranate Red

We had a great and wonderful New Years Eve with good times and good friends, but of course we forgot to take pictures, so my post will be on something almost just as exciting....our living room!

After we moved here, I was eager to paint our originally white living room a fun color, so I went to the local hardware store and picked up their most interesting "mis-tint" and went wild. As much as the quirky orange grew on me over the 2 years we've had it, I felt ready for something more calming. This time, I skipped the mis-tint aisle and did some serious pondering with some good old Benjamin Moore swatches. Here are some pictures of the transformation!

Oh, and I have to give credit to my dear cousin Melanie who came by for most of the project for feedback support and company. Thanks Mel!




I think you should all come for a visit and check this out in person.

2008 Bike Statistics

So the count is in and in 2008 I biked 1,697 miles (2,731 km).

322 of those miles (518 km) were biked with Andrea on our tandem.

Andrea doesn't keep an odometer on her bike, so I don't know what she biked on her own this year.

This is down quite a bit from 2007, when I biked 2,341 miles (3,767 km). The main reason for the difference, I think, is that I started a part time job in February that was only a mile from our house. So this year I was only biking out to the farm 2 times a week, as opposed to four or five times a week in 2007.

I don't have records of how far I biked pre-2007, because it gets so cold in Winnipeg that bike odometers stop working for a couple of months.

The amazing thing is that the only repair I had to make to my bike in all those miles was to fix one flat tire. It's even more amazing when you consider how many of those miles were spent riding on gravel roads with my thin little road tires. Good ol' Howard is one tough cookie.