Born and raised in Michigan, it has been odd to explain to people how I sometimes wind up with a bit of what we up here would call a southern accent. My mom’s side of the family is mostly from the south, and where I’ve never questioned any of them as to why they chose to move up to Michigan and Ohio, here we all (most of anyway) reside. That southern twang in my voice comes from spending hours on end around my grandparents, their siblings, and their siblings’ kids. Family reunions, weekends at one or the others, and even when my grandma and grandpa moved out of Jackson and down to Indiana and then Tennessee before moving back up here, eventually, I still spent a much time as I could with them throughout the year.
I have been told a few times that I pick up accents pretty easy.
The odd thing about it is that I don’t even know that I’m doing it, and sometimes I catch myself and feel horrible for a moment, wondering if the person I’m talking to thinks that I’m mocking them. (My trip to England back in high school had my mom scolding me for speaking with a British lilt during one of our tours.) Every road trip through the southern states, I have to think before I even say thanks to a cashier at a gas station, I pick it up that easily. And to this day, I still don’t say the word coffee without sounding like I’m from Massachusetts, thanks to years of talking to close friends from Boston.
But, I digress.
I’m a norther gal with northern roots and a southern background only because of my family. My great-grandmother’s cooking was the only southern food I would ever eat, too. I’ve never been a picky eater, but truth be told, it wasn’t until I was in high school that my mom learned to cook, and my favorite meals of my grandmother were pretty simple mock-ups of two of my fave foods anyway. But my great-grandma… Man alive, that woman could cook and she had the best southern dishes I had ever had.
If I had to compare recipes at all, I always noticed that my grandma’s called for oleo or margarine, where Great-Grandma Giles’ would be cooking with straight butter or lard. That sounds all sorts of fattening and gross for the dieters and those counting their calories, but older southern recipes I’ve found of theirs both used these polar opposites on the fat scale.
I’m going to say it.
You know what’s coming.
Don’t deny it.
Butter makes everything taste better!
That might be my own skewed opinion, but hey, I have that right. lol Cooking with butter adds a richness. Baking, as well. Besides, I’d prefer to put something that’s a natural fat into my system instead of something fake. My body knows how to absorb and digest natural fats the correct way, and there have been times I’ve questioned why certain diet plans and programs push the use of margarine vs butter as the healthier choice when, to me anyway, it’s just not real! Wouldn’t it be healthier to eat real foods and real fats instead of consuming things that although are less in calories, are made from ingredients that we can barely pronounce?
Oh my lands, I sound like one of those people who only eats off the land, that I always ignored or nodded my head while they talked, as I continued to eat my Quarter Pounder with Cheese from McDonald’s.
Ahh!
Okay, I’ll stop. I’LL STOP!
Maybe…
The point is, butter can make a difference to our every day foods. But, what about our drinks?
Sometime last year my husband made a passing remark about something he heard a co-worker share about something they saw on TV about putting butter in your coffee. I think I instantly sat my mug of joe down and pushed it a slight bit away from me, turning up my nose and the idea and completely turned off at the sight of my coffee and horribly massive amount of creamer. While at the time, that sounded like the worse thing in the world, I’ve noticed it popping up here and there on the internet referred to as Bulletproof Coffee. So, I decided to look it up and the few blogs I read about how people were trying this butter in their coffee thing, made no sense to me, there was no real recipe to follow and no facts for what good it was supposed to do.
Go figure, I finally find something solid about it while searching up the benefits of coconut oil!
The recipe I found for this coffee recipe is here, and there is all the information that you could ever need or want about it.
Go ahead, check out the video on that page. I’ll wait. 🙂
Admittedly, I was not as grossed out this time around, thinking of butter in my coffee, and maybe that is because this past fall I could be found adding coconut oil to my coffee as a way to ingest the oil every day. (That reason alone is a completely different blog post for another time.) So as I sat here earlier tonight, I thought, what the heck, let’s give it a shot, and I went off to make a cup of coffee to add butter and coconut oil to.
First off, it is not near as gross as it sounds. It tastes rather rich and creamy, and it’s sure as heck of a lot cheaper than getting a latte at your local coffee shop! I was mildly impressed by it and I think I’ve found a new treat for my mornings.
Note I said that in the plural.
There’s a reason for this. Usually I can’t drink coffee every day. The caffeine can really do a number on my stomach at times, and other times it just makes me all jittery and feel like my blood sugar levels are way, way off, causing me to jump to eat more things I likely shouldn’t have to eat. This settles well, doesn’t make me feel like I’m so far gone wired and jumpy that I sit still, and a bonus to the coconut oil I’m going to be using is that it helps burn body fat. (*gasps* Can it be true?! And again, that will have to wait for another day’s blog post.) So a mug of coffee every day, might actually be doable for me, if made this way.
In short, I grew up believing that butter was bad for you because it was fattening, only to realize as I’ve gotten older that just because it tastes good, doesn’t mean that it’s bad for you. One or two tablespoons of butter in my coffee every day, might be just the thing I need in my routine.
And maybe it is true, then, that butter really does make everything better.
❤
michigander♥mander 