No Other Butter!

My Aunt Jean is a foodie like me. She renews my subscriptions to Bon Appetit and Cooks Illustrated every Christmas, and then we get to chatter about what recipes we dog-eared and tried with each new issue. She has a fantastic kitchen. Just look at her spice "cabinet" or shall I say, closet.

So when Aunt Jean raves about a certain food item, I make sure to try it. She's usually right about it's awesomeness. The latest item she introduced me to was this FABULOUS butter.

I do not consider myself a butter person. I mean, I put it in food and cookies especially, and I never use faux butter, margarine, or nonsense like that. This butter from the Vermont Butter & Cheese Company made me a butter person. What makes it special is that it's cultured, like cheese and yogurt. It does have a very slight hint of cheese, but it's still very much butter. I'm telling you, once you have this, you're not going back. I could only find it at one specialty store in Indy. I hope you can find it near you. It's worth making a call to Vermont. I promise. Buy it now if you know what's good for you. I don't even know these people, but I want to be their best friend.

At this same specialty store, I picked up this beauty. It's butter from Parma, Italy. I'm thinking, "Hey that's got to be some good stuff," and the packaging sucked me in like it always does. I conducted a blind taste test immediately upon arrival back home. I fed my fella two slices of toast, each lathered with one of the fancy butters. Toast #1 was the Parma butter and #2 was our new favorite from Vermont. After his blind tasting, he noted that #1 had a more average taste - a very subtle difference, but #2 had that little extra somethin' somethin'. But you don't have to take my word for it. This edible gold speaks for itself.