The Butter Lamb Comes To Florida.

I got over-confident once I found out where they keep the rack of lamb in the local Publix. Apparently, you have to ask the butcher for it and then they produce it for you. Once I realized that, I took my rack and hustled over to the diary section hoping against hope that I would find butter lambs on the shelf. But of course, it was not to be. I was a fool.

So I pulled out my trusty lamb mold and set about making my own. Now get this: room temperature butter behaves differently in Florida than it does in New Jersey. I KNOW, right? So the stick of butter that I put out to soften up did so and then some so I had to pull out a different stick to soften for a shorter time. Then I carefully packed the mold so there would be no gaps and put it into the refrigerator for 24 hours.

When I unmolded it on Easter Day, I should have known there was going to be trouble. There was a separation right across the lamb’s skull where the front and back of the mold parts met. I decide to ignore it. That , it turned out, was the wrong decision.

As you can see, the poor thing had some issues to begin with. For some reason, when I pushed in the cloves, they made a slim ring of displaced butter around the eye sockets giving a somewhat googly appearance. And when I inserted a sprig of fresh thyme for the lamb to chew on, a Simpson-type upper lip resulted. But I forged on and created diversions to minimize those flaws – a mixed bed of parsley and thyme, a red ribbon and a grease-free flag

The butter lamb was only out of the refrigerator and in its place of honor on the dinner table for an hour when tragedy struck. I looked over that the lamb’s face has fallen off. Luckily it landed clove side up in the parsley so I was able to retrieve it and stick it back on. It was even less attractive than what you see here and far less symmetrical.

I am going to have to step up my game next year.

Little Lamb God Bless Thee

 

the Butter Lamb getting ready for a long car ride

For whosoever have their own reuse able Butter Lamb mold shall not be defeated by the upstart  butter bunny which hello? is not even an Easter Bunny.

Podcast: Is that a lamb made of … butter? Interesting and mostly correct but a surprising absence of any reference to the Lamb of God, which is the whole point.  Don’t get your history from millennials who never heard  of Agnus Dei. Although, at least they got the Catholic and Polish connections right.

Also, the Google is an ass. Happy Easter!

The Decline Of America

I’m in transit from Denver airport to downtown but I have an important news bulletin to share with you. I left Sami at home and one of the things on his list is to shop for Easter dinner.  Top of the list is the butter lamb.

When the plane landed and I turned on my phone, this is the t t message I found:

  
I don’t even know what to say. I hope I don’t have to explain the difference between a bunny and. The Lamb of God. Fortunately, I have my own mold so we will have a butter lamb on the table. Think of the others, though. Think of the #1 Christian holy day. And a business decision to abandon the butter lamb.

Old And New

pysanky

The two eggs with the darkest backgrounds were a wedding present from my uncle the priest. He gave us three actually but don’t get me started. The other four are modern creations done by my BFF by marriage. That is to say the person who married my BFF.

It’s hard to pick a favorite. But here’s something you should know about the beige and white egg: the shell was dyed and then shallowly cut away exposing the undyed surface and resulting in this design. Pretty cool.

The display plate is Stangl’s Golden Blossom and that abstract design is a flowering perennial plant known as lupine which grows in NJ. I’m thinking of selling of most of my Stangl to finance my vintage china habit but every time I look at even a single piece, I now I’ll never be able to do it.

In other Easter news, there’s a butter lamb a’comin’.

 

Everything Is Going Wrong

Have I mentioned that I can’t do anything right anymore? My big plans for fabulous food this weekend are not off to a good start.

I don’t know if I ever mentioned that my daughter gave me a butter lamb mold for Christmas. I pulled it out today with the intention of making some herb butter and then possibly some beet juice butter to mold up and accompany the commercial butter lamb that Sami brought home this wee. Can you picture it? A whole flock of diverse butter lambs. Teaching the world to sing. Apple trees and honeybees.

But I digress.

The herbed butter lamb has a big pock mark on its face and now I don’t feel like making beet juice butter. I had big  plans to smash Keller’s grip on the global butter lamb market but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen now.

Maybe I’ll pretend that pock mark is a mouth and hang some parsley out of it.

In other news, this is how you have two bossy cooks working at the same time: an annex kitchen. You are looking at a FryDaddy and a FryBaby in simultaneous action:

He was planning to let two vats of hot oil bubble away on their own while he popped over to Shoprite for some cucumbers. When I disagreed with that plan, he gave in suspiciously easily. But whatever.

I thought I threw that plastic tablecloth out years ago and I would a have pitched a fit about it now except should see the get-up he’s got on do do his outdoor cheffing. He walked into the kitchen wearing one of my old scrub jackets from pre-1998. And he brazenly admitted that he found it when he was cleaning out the garage. It was white at one time but now it has various spreading stains on it from an unattended decade and a half in a cardboard box.

Two steps forward, one step back. I don’t know. Everything is going wrong.