I’ve never felt inclined to make butter myself. Yet I LOVE me some raw butter and as of late it’s been pretty hard to come by… and it so good for you.

The most healthful raw butter is a springtime commodity in the milking world.

Cows fed on rapidly growing spring grass produce milk that contains high levels of beta carotene and five times the amount of CLA, an essential fatty acid that has a strong anti-cancer properties. 

The beta-carotene in grass-fed raw dairy is most evident in butter that is a rich deep yellow color.  Grain-fed cows produce a butter that looks white.

Some of you also know that raw butter is a nutritional powerhouse according to Weston A. Price and his work, it is a source of “Factor X”. The “Price Factor X”  (now believed to be vitamin K₂) is only found in raw grass-fed milk butterfat, fish eggs, and the organs and fats of animals. It is how you can heal cavities with nutrition.

Our raw butter source has always been an Amish farmer, the same one we get our pork from. Our Amish farmer knows to make loads of butter in the spring, in fact, he only makes it in the spring! He then freezes it and sells it off to those interested in it. Sadly, he has been out of butter since the fall. Gasp!

We are swimming in raw milk right now because I’ve started a dairy detox to see if it helps Grayson’s newly developed symptoms and Everly is possibly reacting to dairy also. However, we have a gallon of raw milk coming to us each week via our cow share… so I’m exploring dairy preservation techniques!

We are making greek yogurt with the raw milk but are still swimming in it so I gave butter making a try this week. Butter is made from the cream that sits at the top of your raw, undisturbed milk. Skimming cream is easy and doesn’t require any fancy equipment! Keep your milk in a wide mouthed container and when you see the cream separated at the top (it will separate in the fridge or on the counter if it is undisturbed) just use a ladle and scoop the cream off the top.

Put your skimmed cream in a food processor. You can also try a blender or mixer. I started out trying my experiment in a blender and wasn’t too impressed and I hear the mixer can result in a messy process.

Return the butter solids to your bowl and press the chunks together with a wooden spoon, you’ll notice more liquid coming from the solids, more buttermilk. Pour off the liquid periodically. Keep doing this until your butter is liquid free.

Some folks say you should ice wash the butter next, so it keeps longer. I didn’t do this with mine. I’m not concerned will how long it will keep. We eat raw butter like mad!

Now you can enjoy your fresh raw butter or you can wrap it and freeze it for later use. Pretty easy huh?

About that buttermilk… It’s not at all waste! Sure you can use it in recipes that call for buttermilk but you can also use it for anything that calls for plain ole milk. I tried it with this basic pancake recipe and they didn’t taste any different.

So there you have it, homemade butter making is easy and not really all that wasteful. Plus, it’s a great way to stock up on raw butter while not letting your precious raw milk go to waste.

 

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Here is another Weekly Winners post, all photos were captured using my new Kodak Cd-1013 Digital Camera.

This is the crappy food photo edition. Behold my first attempt at making Mac and Cheese from scratch, easy enough right?

I knew something was terribly wrong when the macaroni was practically disintegrated after just a few minutes of cooking but I drained it and proceeded to make the recipe anyway. Here is how it looked when plated up:

N took the first bite and didn’t say anything, he just seasoned the stuff and kept eating. When I took my first bite I practically vomited in my mouth.

The recipe wasn’t bad and the cheesy part was good as was the asparagus that was mixed in.

The problem was the wheat pasta that was no longer pasta. It was more like a wheat mush. Could the issue have been that the pasta was a Big Lots $.25 special? Perhaps it is because it was a product of Mexico?

Either way it was clear to me after one bite that we could NOT eat any of the meal so I grabbed the plates up because N was still trying to be polite by eating the mush and not vomiting… I tried to come up with a quick plan B for dinner.

Luckily we had some frozen burritos in the freezer that we could nuke and enjoy.

Too bad we had to discover some three day old chocolate chip pancakes still chillin’ in the microwave when we went to nuke the burritos.

What? We don’t microwave very often and I never store food in there, unlike some people…

We felt bad about all the wasted food with the botched Mac and Cheese so just for good measure we offered it up to the animals as a “treat”. Usually they jump at the chance for some people food.

When the cats turn their noses up at it you know it is totally bad news…So yeah.

I can make all sorts of complicated things from scratch but Mac and Cheese, not so much. I blame the pasta! Someday I’ll attempt it again with better pasta, but not for a long time. Left a bad taste in my mouth.

The post Weekly Winners May 18th- 24th appeared first on Updates from Ryder Family Farm.

Did you know you can make your own alfredo sauce from cream cheese, milk and butter? You already have milk and butter in the fridge so if you can score an 8oz container of cream cheese for a dollar you can save $2-$3 by making your own alfredo sauce as opposed to buying it ready made.

I love buying whole roasting chickens because I can get 3-4 meals out of them and they are cheap! For the first meal we eat my famous salt roasted chicken, the left over chicken and carcass are saved in the fridge.

Next meal I can make chicken quesadillas with the left over strips of chicken off the saved carcass. When the chicken carcass is almost stripped of all the meat I throw the whole thing into a pot, boil down the carcass/ strip the meat and then I toss the bones in the trash.

After separating the chicken from the broth I preserve most of the chicken broth via caning and freezing. I reserve enough chicken broth and chicken meat and make chicken and dumplings from scratch for the next meal.

I got a roasting chicken for $7.00 made three meals from it and ended up with about 3 half pints of chicken broth for future soups or other dishes!

Do you own a kitchenaid mixer or a similar alternative? Invest in the proper attachments and you can make your own hash browns, potato crisps, pizza dough, pasta, juice and more! We skip buying the frozen hash browns because we make our own with regular potatoes. We also make our own egg pasta and our own raviolis with the kitchenaid.

If all those convenience foods weren’t available in the stores how would people enjoy those same things? They would make then from scratch my friends! If you want to save money on groceries and become less dependent on the commercial food supply you need to experiment making items from scratch! For more ideas consider subscribing to my feed or visiting my blog (www.harvestofdailylife.com)!

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