Nom de Plume

I finally understand exactly what that means.

Today, I noticed that Henzilla seemed, well, fluffier than normal. She’s spent most of her confinement looking like a pancake with a head.

I pulled her up, and with a sinking heart saw another broken egg shell. But then I looked a little harder, and there it was. Yep, a wee baby chickiepoo.

Looked a little harder–and there are two.

So she’s a proud mama, and has proved us all wrong. She’s not a cannibal or a killer.

Sometimes I wonder whether cookbooks are becoming obsolete. I mean, I have cookbooks–and nothing is a better quick kitchen reference than The Joy of Cooking–but I find myself going online to find recipes far more often than looking through cookbooks. (I actually posed this question recently at a small dinner gathering; one guy said that he thought books in general were becoming obsolete. Yikes. Perish the thought.)

Anyway, one of the perils of researching recipes online is the fact that one gets easily sidetracked. For instance, I went online this morning to get the proportions of beef bones to water to make stock. And before you know it, there I am on a page on how to make butter.

Well.

Why not?

Here’s the page (complete with an explanantion of why you shouldn’t feel guilty eating butter). His directions are nice and lucid, and include complete pictures. Should you not feel like clicking, the process of making butter is as simple as throwing heavy cream into a KitchenAid and whipping it until the fat sticks together

So here we are at the buttermilk whooshing out of the butter stage.

We just happen to have an antique butter mold and paddle.

With a nice little pattern inside the mold.

Pressed it in

And now it’s resting in the fridge, waiting to be unmolded.

*Update: It behooves one to read up on how to use a butter mold before one actually uses it. To wit: Apparently, you are supposed to soak it in water for 30 minutes before using it. Otherwise, the butter won’t pop out. Sigh.

Doesn’t she look all sweet and maternal as she incubates her eggs?

Not so much.

Argh.

The really sad thing is that there were only four that were developing nicely, and this was one of those four. I have bad bad feelings about this.

If nothing hatches and she stays broody, I will buy some chicks and sneak them under her in the dead of night. Apparently, this approach sometimes tricks them into thinking they’ve hatched their eggs.

Of course, she’ll probably kill those too.