All posts tagged earth day

The title of this post should really be called “Start Making Butter With Kids & Finishing When They Lose Interest.” This may or may not be an issue for you depending on if you can find non-ultra pasteurized heavy whipping cream (I couldn’t find any so I just used your standard Ultra-Pasteurized version) or if your kids have a better attention span than most. Best of luck on both of those! :D

The process is super easy. Just fill a jar with Heavy Whipping Cream, add a few clean marbles, and shake shake shake. (Shake your booty) Eventually the whey will separate and can be drained. Just look at that creamy, yummy goodness!

Sounds pretty straight forward, right? Silly me for not remembering that nothing is straight forward when you’re dealing with kids. Here are some things I learned…1. Your children will abandon you. Not in the “I’m married now so we’ll be spending holidays with her family” sort of way (although they’ll do that too. Sob.) They will be super excited about shaking their little cans for oh…say…three minutes and then you’ll be left finishing the butter for another twenty. Don’t let this deter you. It’s like a free arm workout, right? Anyway, just think of the amazingly creamy butter you’ll be slathering over everything soon!

2. Do not use mason jars! Sure, the pictures look pretty but I had to throw out an entire batch when the bottom of the jar popped off. And here I was thinking mason jars were the cockroaches of the glass world. Turns out they are not indestructible! As you can see in the shot of my finished butter in whey, we had to switch containers. Our new Kids Konserve snack containers worked wonderfully and fit in nicely with the whole Earth Day theme.

3. Prepare for mass amounts of slathering. Highly suggest you plan on having something to spread your newly made butter on. We ran out of bread the night before and had to scramble around, last minute, to make some easy popovers. It was either that or eat the butter on a spoon. Blech! It was my mistake but I gotta tell you that homemade butter spread on a hot popover, straight out of the oven…amazing.

We did this project to start up a dialog on the upcoming Earth Day 2012 (and, who am I kidding? Because I’m kinda crazy about butter). While we were eating our popovers with butter, Jack and I had a small discussion on trying to make things instead of buying them. Don’t know how much his little three year old brain was able to grasp but I like to think, while he was shoving popovers in his mouth, something might have gotten absorbed (other than the butter dripping all over his shirt!).