Maitre d'Hotel Butter (Page 894)

RECIPE #779

• Date: Sunday, July 6, 2008 -- 8pm
• Location: Somerville, MA
• Kitchen: Matty's Apartment
• Dining Companions: Rachel, Eric, and Matty
• Recipe Rating: B
  

This is one of 6 different compound butter recipes left in The Book (only one left to go!). I picked it to go with dinner last weekend because I was looking for a quick recipe that would work as a spread for bread. This lemony parsley butter was pretty tasty. As Matty said, it was "better than regular butter." That sounds like a low bar, but it definitely has not been the case for every compound butter we have made. This butter had a nice clean flavor to it, and was generally inoffensive. My one complaint is that lemon juice just doesn't incorporate very well into butter. Despite seemingly endless smushing of the butter and lemon juice with a fork, the lemon juice just kept separating out. I had this same problem with a previous compound butter recipe from The Book. I'd imagine an electric mixer would do the trick, so I would recommend beating in the lemon juice, and then smushing in the remaining ingredients with a fork before rolling it up into a log. I also am not such a fan of the butter-log presentation. If using this as a spread it would no doubt be much cuter if it were piped into a little ramekin using a big star tip, and then chilled like that before serving. Overall though, as far as compound butters go, this one was pretty good.

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Whenever my special gentleman and I are living in the same place we try to make a point of taking most or all of the day off of work on Saturdays and doing something special together. Today for our special Saturday we headed up to the North Shore and went sea kayaking. One of the great sources of joy in my life is water. I love to be in water, near water, on water... I love to shower, to swim, to boat, to sit in hot tubs, to wade in kiddie pool, to go down the slip-and-slide. I love water parks more than almost anything else in the world. I love Niagara falls. I love the ocean. I love speedboats and tour boats, paddleboats and canoes. And of course, I love kayaks. I used to whitewater kayak a little bit way back in my Wisconsin days, and I have toured around various lakes in sea kayaks. But strangely, I had never been in a sea kayak in the actual sea. Until today! We had such a good time. We went out kayaking for a few hours right around sunset, and it was spectacularly beautiful. The sun setting over the ocean was amazing. We paddled out to this little island and sat on the water watching the waves break against the shore (and the surfers riding them). It was a lovely feeling to be in a little boat in a huge ocean, rocking with the waves. We have done a lot of cool special Saturday activities, but this was one of my favorites!