Butter and Rest: Brown Butter Breakfast

I have grown silly happy fond of Saturdays. They are made up of work, no doubt, but there is also the hint and anticipation of rest to come, combined with the extra time at my fingertips that is normally devoted to schooling Quail. It is a day for trying new recipes (currently on the cooling rack: a twinkie bundt cake. Simmering on the stove: beef leek barley soup and persimmon orange marmalade. To be continued on that one), for extra long stretchy yoga practice, for not wearing makeup and instead applying that weird cranberry turmeric face mask that looks like baby poop (both in color and texture) and perhaps ironically makes your skin feel as soft as the baby’s patootie from whence the mask comparison originated. Laundry, yes, but less than on a week day and with the added purpose of supplying clean sheets for clean toes at the end of the day. You know what would make your Saturday even more perfect? Brown butter.

But wait, you say (being the astute reader that I know you to be), that is a recipe for coconut bread, nothing to do with brown butter at all, and while we are at it, what the heck is brown butter?? Remember that really obnoxious teacher you had in school who would give you a test that first said to read the entire test, and then if you actually did, the last question would tell you to just sign your name and turn it in? Man, that guy hacked me off… however, today, that is what you need to do, because at the end of the really really super tasty coconut bread recipe that your family needs you to make for tomorrow is the even more really really super tasty recipe for honeyed brown butter spread that needs to go on top, and on quite a few other things in your life… like a spoon.

Brown butter is simply butter that you have cooked in a pan past the point of melted and into the point of mild darkening. The flavor is unbelievable. Somehow it is salty, and caramely, and there is nothing to it but heat and time. Brown butter may be one of God’s kindest metaphors for suffering well: it takes heat to bring out the beauty, the complexity, the flavor, that then turns and blesses everything it touches. If God has turned up the flames in your life, take heart — this is going to end well. Happy Sabbath, y’all.

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