Butter Drought

Butter is one amazing food.  Cooking without butter would leave our plates really dry and flavorless.  I'm no Paula Deen but I do love butter in my cookies, quick breads, and on top of baked potatoes.  Have you seen the price of butter at the grocery store lately?!?!  It's almost $4.00 a pound!  That is crazy!  Last fall I bought butter for $1.50 and that was a stock up price.  I saw butter for $2.97 at my grocery store and I bought all I could.  This is a good reminder of why we need to prepare.  Inflation!!  Buy food now while it's affordable.  

*remember to have a back up (or two) for your fresh foods*

Usually I have about 20lbs of butter in my freezer and it is enough to get us through until the next sale at the grocery store. About 2 weeks ago I was down to my last pound of butter.  I didn't worry because I figured a sale was just around the corner.  But, no sale came.  Meanwhile, to get us through the butter drought, I made some butter from shelf stable cream that I had in my storage.  Shelf stable cream is my first choice for spreadable butter.  It's delicious and tastes like fresh butter.  We wanted to savor it though, and so it was only used it for toast.  Click HERE to see how I made the butter. Even though it's delicious, it would take a lot of shelf-stable cream, to make butter, to use every time I needed it for a recipe.

 Powdered butter is my go-to option if fresh butter isn't available.  I still wanted to bake and so my second choice for shelf stable butter is Thrive's butter powder.  I LOVE Thrive's butter powder.  You can read how I taste tesed it HERE.  I was able to bake cookies, make mashed potatoes, pumpkin muffins, and even a cream sauce for macaroni and cheese, and it all worked. It is a really amazing product.  I highly recommend it! Sign up for their emails and buy a can when they have a sale.  (A #10 can is around $28.00 right now on thrive.com and a #10 can equals 24 sticks of butter. Which makes it around $4.60 a pound. I have only purchased my powdered butter when it was on sale to lower my price per pound. )

I am hoping that my butter drought will be over as soon as the holidays are here.  Most baking supplies will be on sale in the next few months.  But if the demand is high and supply is low....our price at the store will skyrocket.  Food storage isn't just for the end of the world.