Jason bought a crock for butter, and now his butter tastes so much better!

I have re-discovered the goodness of butter. Actually, let me correct that: I have *discovered* the goodness of butter, never having realized it before. Back home, when I was a kid, we used to keep the butter in the fridge (naturally), and if I wanted to have some with my breakfast, or to make sandwiches with, I'd have to leave it out for several hours beforehand --- like overnight --- to melt. (We didn't have microwave ovens back then.) I didn't use that butter very much.

Besides, I don't ever remember it tasting all that wonderful, either. Might just have been the kind of butter we got in India back then. The cheese there wasn't so great, either.

By the time I came to the US, I had heard all about margarine. And was quite vehemently opposed to using it. a) Because it wasn't the "real thing", and b) because I badly needed to put *on* weight, not lose it. (I still do. And still grumble at having to hunt for "regular" food among all the low-fat/non-fat/reduced-fat variants whenever I go grocery shopping.) My aunt --- with whom I stayed for a while before I moved into the dorms, and whose choice of household items for running her house (Tide detergent, Polaner jam, Philadelphia Flavours cream cheese, Lipton tea bags, Eggo waffles...) left me, an impressionable, fresh-off-the-boat newcomer to the American Way, forever brand-loyal --- used to use something called "Shedd's Country Crock". It looked, to me, and behaved, like butter, except that it never got hard in the fridge. And I remember it actually *saying* "butter" somewhere on the outside of the container. Eight years of devoted usage later, I actually re-read the label, and was left incredibly disappointed. I guess I should've been more suspicious about it having that miraculous non-hardening quality.

So I set out to look for a butter dish, just like I'd seen in other people's homes. A container in which I could leave the butter outside so that it would always be ready-to-spread whenever I wanted it. (My roommate used to use a regular tupperware container, but that was just ugly, and meant one less tupperware container for storing other things in.) Strangely enough, I was never able to find one --- that was inexpensive enough. (It's just a *butter dish*, for crying out loud!) Then I found something called a "butter bell" at Marshalls, a local discount department store. (You can read more about it at the manufacturer's website, and at all these other websites, too.) It didn't look like anything I'd ever seen before, but it looked neat, and seemed to make sense from a scientific/engineering standpoint (it was very-practically sized to contain the same volume of butter in a standard stick... the water not only sealed off the container, but also, by evaporating, kept the whole thing cool, just like the clay/earthen `matkas' we have back in India for keeping water cool) and it was just 10 bucks. I bought it.

And it works like a charm! Haven't had any problems with mold so far (See the concerns expressed here), and the butter makes my sandwiches and pancakes and waffles and toast taste so much better! Plus, it just seems to have a certain old-world charm about it all. Or maybe that's just me. Whatever. Yay for butter!