"European" Butter

So, I was out shopping today after depositing my Unemployment check, and I had a short list. You may recognize it:

A loaf of bread, a bottle of milk, and a stick of butter.

Well, not exactly. A loaf of bread, a container of egg nog, and a pound of butter. And I ended up also buying fresh fruit, because fresh fruit is always on my grocery list. How could I get to 5 servings a day if I don’t buy fruit on every shopping trip? Anyway, my initial reason for going was that I absolutely need butter for the baccala making tomorrow. I had less than a stick of butter left, and while the recipe doesn’t call for much butter, I’m making quite a few batches of it to use up all the remaining fish & to try some other ingredients in the mix as well.

So there I was, standing dazed and light headed* in the grocery store, fruit in my basket and butters and margarines and … who knows what they make Promise and ICBINB out of? Anyway, I was going to just get a pound of the Land O Lakes butter that was on sale, but as long as I was looking at every available butter, I noticed that the top shelf of butter was “European Style” butter.

Those of you who know me know that reading those words basically decided for me that I would be buying the more expensive butter. I read the labels and compared the prices and tried to determine which of the “European” butters I would buy, and whether I would have a good excuse to do so when I did. I guess the difference between normal butter and “European style” is in the churning. The labels say that it should be a sweeter, creamier butter, and should make all my baked goods better than with regular butter. We shall see.

I bought half a pound of the European and a pound of the on-sale regular butter. I’ll use the European butter in the first couple of batches of baccala in the morning and see if it still tastes like baccala, or is worse or better. Then I’ll switch over to the regular butter so I have European butter available for future baking endeavors, to see if it makes a difference there.

Oh, err.. then I found the light egg nog (they didn’t have Shamrock Farms, which is my preference) and the bread and came home.

*See my post on being sick. I’m not feeling altogether well right now.