Bread and Butter for Malia

Malia was sick last week. It wasn’t COVID, but she did end up missing three days of school because she was running a low-grade fever and was super congested in her head and nose. It was the end of the term which unfortunately meant she missed three days of fun class activities. One of those was Colonial Day, the day when the entire fifth grade participates in a variety of activities that help them learn what life was like in Colonial America. Probably the most exciting of those activities was making bread and butter. We make bread all the time and Malia has even made it mostly on her own, but making butter is a different story. Because Matthew is allergic to milk, we are a hardcore margarine family. And we need to be super picky about our margarine as well since most margarines have some milk in them. As a result, making real butter is something I haven’t done with my kids. In fact, I don’t think Malia has ever even eaten real butter.

I told Malia we could make bread and butter when she was feeling better and today was the day. As she was shaking her container of cream, she remembered that she actually made butter when she was in first grade. It was one of those activities where the kids rotated to different teachers though, and the teacher making butter was not Malia’s teacher. As a food allergy kid, she was not going to eat something she didn’t know as safe and since she didn’t trust this other teacher to know her food needs, Malia opted to make the butter but not eat it. I didn’t know about that experience but hearing her talk about it made me even happier that we had taken the time to make butter in a situation where she felt safe eating it.

Dinner this evening was soup, fresh bread hot from the oven, and homemade butter. It was delicious. And Malia was mighty pleased as she slathered her own butter on her own bread. I suspect the effort and experience made it even tastier to her.