5 July 2001

Last year: They won that argument.

If you're not on the notify list, you might not have noticed that I wrote an entry yesterday. It wasn't intended to be controversial, but it did stir up at least one person's feathers.

I decided yesterday - well, actually I made the decision Tuesday evening - that I was going to revive a 4th of July tradition from my childhood, and make homemade butter. Mom and I used to do this when I was very little - you pour a cup of heavy cream into a jar and shake it for about half an hour or forty-five minutes, and butter forms. It's a fairly tiring process. I can remember that Mom always used to have to take over for me after about five minutes or so.

The lucky thing for me is that my breadmaker also has a program for making butter. I bought a pint of cream, intending to make one batch with the breadmaker and one by hand. I got the breadmaker started, then poured the remaining cup of cream into a tupperware container. (As a kid, we'd use Mason jars, but I don't have any of those.)

After about forty-five seconds of shaking the tupperware container, I realized... No, not that I'm that out of shape, but that the container was leaking a bit. Oops. Maybe that wasn't such a good idea. I gave up and made both batches with the breadmaker. Those of you who were excited by the idea when I talked to you about it on Tuesday... Sorry to disappoint. But the butter tastes lovely.

We spent the evening with Braz and Kris and Jeremy and Elizabeth, having a cookout at Jeremy and Elizabeth's. It rained, naturally, stopping just as Jeremy had screwed up his determination to go ahead and cook in the rain. After we all ate, we sat around talking and half-dozing from food-coma for a while, then went outside to play with some sparklers.

You know, if you take a camera from an air-conditioned house out to a humid, hot evening, the lens fogs over and takes a while to recover? Sorry Kris is so blurry...

Wow, with the blur, they look almost like fireworks!

--Liz

Word of the Day:
Aesopian - of, relating to, or characteristic of Aesop or his fables; conveying an innocent meaning to an outsider but a hidden meaning to a member of a conspiracy or underground movement
 
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