It’s amazing how a simple ingredient has the ability to refresh.  Add a scarf to a plain black dress, and instantly an outfit is improved.  Add a little greenery on a book shelf and it looks finished.

The same is true in foods.  Sometimes sprucing up a plain ingredient can really add pizazz to a meal.  The ingredient I’m thinking about today is Paula Deen’s favorite staple.  Yep, it’s butter.  Though I try to keep a handle on the amount I use, so I don’t end up with handles around me, it is a really great additive to plain foods.  But I’m not talking about just plain butter…

The Chop House Restaurant serves a small pork chop with some kind of herbed butter on top.  It is soooo good, and it takes a very simple piece of meat to the next level.  Recently while looking through my herb cookbook, I found a recipe for Rosemary Butter and had to give it a try.  I browned up pork chops and popped a little spoon of my seasoned butter on it and I was in heaven!  The recipe also suggests using it on fresh vegetables or broiled or grilled chicken.  I had a little extra and popped some inside my baked potato.  Oh, yes.  It was yummy!

Here’s the recipe.  It makes lots, but you could cut the recipe in half or fourths, which is what I did.

Rosemary Butter

Try this on baked or boiled chicken, boiled new potatoes or fresh garden vegetables

1 C butter, softened
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 T chopped fresh rosemary, or 2 tsp dried
1 T chopped fresh parsley
2 tsp grated lemon peel
Salt and pepper


Combine all ingredients in a mixing bowl. Makes 1 cup.


Try an herbed butter to a plain food and see what it does.  You’ll be licking your fingers!

See you in church!

Be refreshed,

It never happened before and it hasn’t happened since, but boy did I enjoy it while I could! There was a short period of time that I had a maid!  You didn’t know pastor’s made that kind of money, did you?  Well, trust me, at the time that I had this luxury it was not due to a cushy bank account!  I had just given birth to our youngest daughter and had my hands very full.  I was homeschooling my second grader, nursing a baby who took 15 minute naps, trying to keep the housework up, do the mounds of laundry (which included cloth diapers!) and cook meals for my family of four.  Needless to say, I was exhausted.  Some of you are in the midst of all that and more and you understand and feel my pain. 

I have a mother who is very compassionate, and when she realized all that was going on in my world, she insisted on paying for me to have a maid to come in and take care of me and our home for two weeks.  Wasn’t that nice of her?!  (It goes way beyond nice, but those are the terms our family uses for a sweet gesture!)  It was my responsibility to “hire” someone.  I felt like Lucy did when she was interviewing Mrs. Porter!  I’d heard that a woman that was in our church had been a professional maid, so I took her at her word and hired her to come to my home. 

It turns out she’d been a professional cleaner – not a maid, and there is a difference.  She sure did make my house shine! However, when my mom called and asked me what she fixed me for lunch, I had to fess up that cooking was not on my maid’s list.  So, I had a maid, yet still fixed my own lunches. But hey, I felt very blessed to be a young wife, and new mommy having a personal maid come and clean my little parsonage!

Was there ever a time when you got treated with something really special?

From my parsonage window,

 
P.S.  In answer to the question I posed yesterday, I’d choose the roast beef I fixed myself.  I’d end up eating it while standing at the kitchen counter anyway.  I’d nibble while working on the bank statement or next week’s menu, like I often do when I’m home alone.    I think for most of us, it’s easier to serve than to be served.