ottawa foodies

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www.weightymatters.ca

Quote : "You know what else has a "delicious buttery taste"? Frickin' BUTTER!"

Haha! I happily switched from margarine to butter when I discovered the www.butterbell.com/ at Grace in the Kitchen & Serious Cheese. It allows you to store your butter at room temperature so it's always ready for spreading.

The reality is, butter has a stronger flavour and tastes somehow richer than margarine so you use less of it and therefore ingest fewer calories. Better taste, fewer calories... sign me up!

However, I'm not sure I'd take the absolution of saturated fat as a risk factor for disease to necessarily mean that butter is nutritionally superior to margarine. I believe current knowledge still says plant-based saturated fats (e.g. coconut oil) are significantly healthier than animal ones.

Hahaha! A few years ago I used to be able to get butter cheese from a shop near my Dad's place. It is basically butter flavoured cheese. One of my gf's once said to me "Why don't you just eat butter?" I immediately thought of that story when I saw this thread.

You "discovered" a butter dish warby ?

They were a standard item in kitchens in NS when I was growing up

Maybe I grew up ignorant, but I had never seen one with a water seal that prevents the butter from developing that unappetizing translucent "skin" it tends to get in standard butter dishes.

Mmm, yummy butter! I used to never understand why people liked margarine. When I was a kid it seemed like it was mostly really old people that liked margarine. ;-)

I don't think I got the margarine thing until I bought our own cow. Our Jersey provides us with this crazy yellow, soft butter in the spring. At a glance, it look soooo different from store butter that most people think it's margarine.

Makes sense to me now, all those old folks eat margarine and the soft texture and crazy colour must remind them of the butter they had as kids, lol!

"saturated fat has been exonerated as being an independent risk factor of disease"

Hmm. That may be technically true, although the comments below would suggest that the point is at least arguable, but even if we accept it as a truth, as far as I can tell he's basically saying that if your diet is otherwise perfect then you don't need to worry about saturated fats on their own causing you a problem. Well, hands up everyone here who has a nutritionally perfect diet. The rest of you (that's all of us) should continue to exercise care over the intake of saturated fats.

I exercise care.. I use butter usually for cooking (with an occasional bit melted on a warm croissant or something like that). On bread? Nothing. Why hide the taste of spreadables? :) So I pretty much only use butter. (I also don't use mayo because I would put so little on sandwhiches that a jar always went bad before 1/4 was gone.)

Just went to check our butter and can't see any translucent skin on it. Looks like butter. And at the moment we don't even have a dish - just sitting in the foil on a plate, loosely wrapped.

I've been eating saturated fats with wild abandon for 4 or 5 years now and my last checkup about a year ago came back perfect on all counts, including blood tests.

My parents used to tell me that when margarine first came out in Nova Scotia it was not allowed to be coloured yellow but they were allowed to include a little packet of yellow colouring that you could mix in yourself if you wanted

EDIT: saturated animal fats

My Gran smoked three packs a day all her life and never got cancer, therefore smoking clearly isn't harmful.

Yoni Freedhoff is my hero.

Well good point Johnny English, but I'm only worried about me, not the rest of you. It does not seem to be hurting me any so I might as well "give 'er" :-)

BTW warby, our butter does look a bit unappetizing I suppose, and maybe this is what you mean - so I could be experiencing the same thing. I just always accepted that as what butter looks like on the counter - it does not seem to change the flavour. I mainly just worry about something to keep the dust off it

I like to eat food that isn't chemically processed i.e.margarine, especially from genetically modified plants--mainly canola and soy (the main oil used in the production of margerine). My preference for oil is olive oil(mainly) and a little..maybe more than a little...butter (occasionally--I love it but use it as a treat and in specialty baking aka christmas cookies.) BTW-butter can be stored in the freezer. Keep a small slice at room temp, covered (butter dishes have been around forever for a reason!)and keep the rest in the freezer until time to use. Salted butter keeps better than unsalted-salt is a preservative.

We keep 3 or 4 pounds of butter in the freezer at a time (wouldn't want to run out). Pull a pound out to thaw, then cut it in half and put that on the counter, the rest in the fridge. I've never seen this "butter skin" you talk of. I guess it just never gets to that point around here.

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I buy a couple of pounds at a time when it's on sale. Bring it home and quarter it, rewrap it in it's wrapper, and freeze it. you can take it out, separate a chunk off the frozen pound to thaw, and throw the other back in the freezer. It lasts forever in the freezer and I never have to pay full pop! Cheers.

FF - that "skin" you speak of happens to butter when I leave it out in my kitchen. A single person (not eating a full stick very fast) does need something to prevent the butter from getting weird (my description, yours is more apt). I'm definitely going to look into this dish you found. I keep margarine in the fridge - my Dad is obsessed and thinks eating it will somehow balance out all the steak. But again, I can't fault him - any 56 year old guy who can best his 31 year old daughter in a 15km race gets full "eat what you want" props :)