Popovers via Julia Child!

So ever since we visited my aunt and uncle in San Jose and they made us popovers with jam, we've been obsessed. They're fun and easy to make and now they're a semi-regular weekend tradition. We decided to try out Julia Child's popover recipe from the book Baking with Julia.

Autumn says, "Popovers! Yay!" (I swear the cupcake onesie was completely coincidental!)

Ingredients:

1 cup all-purpose flour (unbleached)

1 cup whole or 2% milk, at room temp (I used 1%, worked fine)

1/2 tsp salt

3 large eggs

2 tbsp unsalted butter, melted

So first, you grease up the muffin pan. You can use a special popover muffin pan (the holes are larger) or ramekins, but we don't have all of that so we use a regular muffin pan. It works just fine. Position the rack on the lowest rung of your oven and preheat to 425 degrees. If you do use ramekins or custard cups, put them on a jelly roll pan and leave space between the cups. 

Pour all of the ingredients into a blender and whirl until smooth. (can also be done in a food processor or with a hand mixer). Strain batter if it is at all lumpy.

For muffin cups, use 1/4 cup of batter per cup, filling alternate holes so each popover has puffing space. 

Bake without opening the door for 25 minutes until they are puffed, nicely browned and crisp on exterior. Turn the temp down to 350 and bake another 15-20 minutes to help dry out the interior, which no matter what you do will always be a little doughy in the center. (Some pull this out, others it's their favorite part - I love it).

Serve immediately.

We serve them with jam. You could also have them with butter or honey.

You can wrap them airtight and freeze them for up to a month and reheat them at 350 for 10-15 minutes. 

Butter

So yesterday was another one of those days. You know, where you don't get a good night's sleep so you wake up cranky, to a cranky kid and it just snowballs from there. My baking/SAHM friend Michelle invited me over to make some butter. Just for fun. Seeing the need to get out of the house and have a little adult conversation, (you know, other than, "Stop that! That's the dog's food! Did you poop? What do you have in your mouth now?") I said an enthusiastic "sure!" and headed over.

I've joked more than once that I should learn how to make my own butter because I use so much of it. Actually I joke that a cow would have paid for itself by now, but you know, I love to bake and baking calls for butter. Michelle looked up how to make it and decided that she should try it out. It's ridiculously easy. So easy in fact, that you're going to laugh.

Here's the directions: Pour heavy whipping cream into a jar. Shake.

Yep. That's it. I mean there's some pointers along the way, but that's pretty much all you do. So here's how the shaking went...


What you need:

You need to leave some room for the cream to work it's magic. We ended up having to remove some of the cream part way through, so leave some more room than this. 

Shake for 20 minutes.

And this is what you get. It's done when the solid part (the butter) starts separating from the liquid (buttermilk). You strain the liquid out and you're left with butter.

Results: it was good and tasted like butter. It's not exactly cost effective though because the heavy cream is over $3 and it only makes about 1 sticks worth (maybe 2) of butter. I'm sure back in the good ole' days they didn't buy ultra-pasteurized heavy cream from the store and make it this way, so there's got to be a more cost effective way to do it. But this is fun as a learning lesson for kids and they can all take part in shaking the jar to make butter. 

Note: I'm reading this very interesting book called, The Feast Nearby by Robin Mather. (Find it on amazon here) It's all about eating locally on a budget and it's also super informative about food. I found out tidbits like ultra-pasteurized means that the milk is brought to a super high temp, causing the vitamins and all the good, natural things in milk to be depleted. They do it in certain products like heavy cream to extend it's shelf life because it doesn't sell as fast as regular milk. Trying to find local heavy cream that's not ultra-pasteurized is pretty difficult. For those of you living in the central florida area, I did find out that most of Publix's milk products are from local dairy farmers. Whoo hoo! All of their milk is rbST free (which means that the cows weren't given a horrible hormone to make them lactate at an unnatural rate) and that most of their dairy products are too. They said that in the hot summer months, when lactation in dairy cows is low, that they have to suppliment some of their milk from other suppliers out of state to make things like yogurt, ice cream and cheese so they can't guarantee that all of their dairy products are rbST free then. So, not 100%, but better than nothing. 

Happy eating!