Now that warmer weather is here and the butter is impossible to deal with

Butter - my favorite fat(well fat/water combo). Nothing tastes as good on toast, in pastry, for cooking eggs, making cakes......

However butter is problematic to make usable. Keep it in the fridge and you can't spread it easily, keep it on the counter when the weather is warm and it spreads in a greasy pool all over the place. So, what to do?

Enter the butter bell. This is a clever little device that keeps the butter away from the air so it doesn't go rancid, and keeps it cool by immersing it in cold (icy) water.

So to use it, you follow the simple steps....

Step 1: put about 1/2 cup water into the base of the butter bell, and then begin to add the butter into the lid.

Step2: Push the butter firmly into the lid.

Step 3: Immerse the lid into the base. Store the butter bell on the counter. Do not put in the fridge - if you do all your good work will be for naught.

That's the instructions according to the official site. However because we live in Texas and during the day our kitchen gets kinda warm, we use a slight variant. I fill the base with crushed ice to the top. Then add chilled water. When I invert the top into the base, some water runs out. I place the whole butter bell close to the sink, so that as the ice melts, the top slips down into the water, displacing some water into the sink. This give maximal cooling, but because the volume isn't huge, the effect of the ice is minimized - i.e. the butter goes a bit hard, but we do this after breakfast, and by lunchtime the butter is nice and usable again.

Using the butter bell means we don't have to resort to whipped/processed/artificial/chemistry set tasting spreads on our toast - and we end up not using as much as we would if we attempted to spread it straight from the fridge.

The web site sells these, but any good kitchen store does too. We have used ours for 5 years now, and can't imagine being without it.