Herbed rice with favas and zucchini-purslane soup....and butter!

Herbed rice with fava beans and zucchini-purslane soup.

Our friend Tom came in from out of town last night (because he happens to like New York) and he kindly joined us for dinner. The rice dish was somewhat like a pilaf, but baked, so that the herbs infused the surrounding rice with flavor. It contained dill, parsley, cilantro, and garlic scapes (our substitute for scallions), and we threw in some chopped walnuts at the end for added texture. Lizz picked up local summer squash at the Morningside Heights greenmarket to supplement last week's haul.

For dessert, Lizz also picked up some local blueberries. We were so enchanted with our discovery of last night that we planned to use our last quarter-cup of cream to make whipped cream for a topping. We supplemented it with a little bit of milkfat from the top of a nonhomogenized bottle. However, as Tom graciously whisked the cream with a little sugar, the mixture didn't seem to be reaching the same hard peaks stage we had seen the previous night. And then, in just a couple of seconds, it suddenly turned into THIS:



After we all got done exclaiming in shock and horror at the unexpected transformation, Lizz bravely took a taste, and suggested that perhaps we had just accidentally made butter. It seemed too good to be true that we would stumble on TWO different whipped dairy products within two days, but indeed, a little internet research confirmed that this actually IS how butter is made! If you continue whipping plain cream past the hard stage, it will in a matter of seconds fall out into butter and the thin buttermilk you see in the picture.

So we didn't have any whipped cream with our blueberries, but we were extremely pleased with the discovery nonetheless, and decided to incorporate it into the dessert in another way.



Blueberries with cinnamon toast....with homemade butter.