Hold on a second! It's Tuesday! Where were you over the weekend when I needed you! Where were you when I wanted you? Okay, I'm sorry.
Anyway, I'm going to give you a tip that's going to give you power over nature. You're going to beat it down with your right hand until it screams for mercy, drooling and babbling. And, no, that's not a filthy euphemism.
Well, this weekend you're going to make your own butter. This actually (obviously) creates at the same time your own buttermilk. And what does any self-respecting young person do with buttermilk? The same thing your cat would do! Make biscuits! And making butter is easy and pretty tasty and impressive. If you've made whipped cream before you can make butter. So, butter first, biscuits later. Butter is good for everything which is not true of biscuits. They're only good for most things.
Step one is to demonstrate your power over nature and churn out some butter in a rather suggestive manner. I imagine you're buying cream at the supermarket like I do. This is fine. It's going to be about 36% fat. The first step is to let your cream come to room temperature and sit there for a few hours. It's best to let the cream start to spoil just a little bit to bring out the flavor. Also, it's very important to have it at about 60 degrees for the churning. I'm not sure why. I just read the sentence ""Let the cream be at the temperature of 55° to 60°, by a Fahrenheit thermometer; this is very important" from the Household Cyclopedia of 1881 and I was sure it must be.
From here you just pour the cream into your mixing bowl and get a whisk and have at it. Actually, you can do this however you want. You can put it in a jar and shake it for an hour. You can put it in a food processor or use a Kitchen Aid or a hand mixer if you're a big titty-baby. The important thing is that it needs to be agitated to break down some molecules or some such and the fat (butter) separates in clumps from the non-fat AKA buttermilk. I would, however, recommend you do this the first time by hand. Otherwise you can't beat that tattoo onto Mother Nature like I promised we would. Use two cups of cream.
Now, it's important not to let anyone see you whisking cream because there's a built-in joke that goes with it. Like, if you want to hang a picture on the wall and need to use a "stud finder" and someone invariably points it at his chest? Same kind of thing.
Just beat the hell out of that cream. it goes through stages. Blah blah. You'll stop at stiff peaks and think to yourself "What? Only stiff peaks? How can I get through this?" Well, we're in this together. I promised you I would help you beat your cream out.
Keep going! You can do it! Things are easy once you get past the stiff peaks, anyway. And you'll notice right away when you get to butter, anyway. Clumps form at buttermilk falls out. And since we need one cup of buttermilk and butter is 80% fat and the cream we started with was 36%, right? So that's roughly half and half, right? Better then multiplying by 9/5 and adding 32. This kitchen is fast and loose. You'll use the buttermilk in the biscuits this weekend. For now, butter is enough. This is one scene that's going to be played my way.
After the butter forms--and it will most likely get caught in your whisk, anyway--you can pour out the fresh buttermilk and save that for the biscuits. Now, you could just stop here and use your hands to press out the rest of the liquid and have some awesome, awesome butter. To finish it "properly," you'll need to keep adding ice cold water to the mixing bowl, beat it out, drain it, add more, beat it, and drain it until the water runs out clear. Personally, I don't think that's necessary (well, maybe once) since this butter isn't going to last the day anyway, even if it is almost a half a pound. Call the doctor.
As to the buttermilk itself it's actually better that the stuff in the store, too. That stuff isn't exactly buttermilk like this stuff is. It's really just acidulated regular milk. What!?!
Anyway, this really only takes ten minutes is totally impressive and has a sweet, clean taste. And you decide how much salt to knead in, too. Or you could go further and clarify it, or make garlic butter, or whip it and make compound butter. Anything you'd use butter for except better. Here's what it looks like:
Also, here's more about butter than you need to know.
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