Oh man, I have gotten on the butter a.k.a. bulletproof coffee bandwagon. Though I don't know if this is the seventy six trombones with a hundred and ten cornets kind of bandwagon or just a couple of cranks with combs and wax paper, I'm sensitive lately that—speaking of butter, did you ever read Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder? The part where the butter salesman samples Mrs. Wilder's butter with a thin tube that he sticks down into the tub of butter? That's what I'm talking about, that I'm only sampling a thin tube out of the whole tub of the world. Where the world is more variant than Mrs. Wilder's butter, which was uniform and good all the way through. I'm pretty sure that my tube of butter isn't the same butter all around, but it's easy to take it for that. And by tube of butter, I mean the blogs that I follow on my feedly (which is what I am replacing my google reader with). Anyway the blogs I follow are tending more toward paleo these days, and through my tube it looks like everybody is drinking bulletproof coffee and, finally, here's a concrete answer for my dad about whether if everybody jumped into Lake Michigan, would I jump into Lake Michigan: uh, yes? I'd want to know what that was all about. Actually, I'm going to let Joel Runyon explain what it's all about for you:
Because really, I am not an authority about such things. I can't tell you that drinking butter is going to help you burn fat or get lean or geez not have a heart attack, I don't know about that. I'm not a dietitian. It's something that I'm trying for myself, and that's all I can tell you about. It's all in the context of, shall we say, an undulating reduction of the amount of starch in my diet, which has been ongoing for the last couple of years. I do feel better the less starch that I eat, and I do eat more protein—which is to say, meat—than I used to. I like to think, though, that I've mostly replaced starches with vegetables and fruit. I have, right? I pretty fervently believe that whether you're vegan or paleo, half of your plate should be vegetables and we can meet on this common ground.
Of course, butter coffee is not a vegetable.
Here's what's going on with butter coffee for me. So there was a little opera about the bagel this winter and then the fat lady sang, and that was the end of that opera. And now I'm testing a get lean program, and getting lean means getting strict with your diet—yeah, it does—and this is about the strictest my diet has ever been: alcohol, sugar, and/or processed starch (pasta, bread) once a week, and starchy protein (grains, legumes) or starchy vegetable (potato, sweet potato) once a day. And man, once a week is not a lot. And once a day is not a lot. You actually have to choose whether you're going to have baked oatmeal now, because that's it for the day then. Or do you want to eat this ice cream in bed tonight, or do you want to have a jack and ginger on Saturday night when you're out with your friends. I'm not saying that it's bad to choose the ice cream! Just that choosing something means not something else. And coming off the opera about the bagel, there were more than a few things regularly appearing in my mouth that I wouldn't choose now over baked oatmeal. Like the cup of tea and two three four biscoff cookies that I was sitting down to write with, there's the rub. You write with your brain, and your brain runs on sugar. And honestly if it came down to giving up writing or giving up sugar, I wouldn't give up writing. I mean this quite seriously and not in the sense that writing is that important. I really think that it's all about deciding what's important to you and choosing, and then accepting what you've chosen. Or hey, adjusting what you've chosen. I will say more about that later; as it is, this is the world's longest recipe for butter coffee. Pssh though, who reads me because I'm succinct.
As it happens, I didn't have to choose between writing and sugar. Enter butter coffee. So far it's working that a hot, luxurious, and incidentally caffeinated beverage gives me just the right pause and kick to sit down and write. At some point I will also have something to say about how sit down always seems to go with write.
And that is basically what I have to say about butter coffee. It's hot. It's luxurious. Oh and it's filling, there's that too. And here's how I make mine, I get Kerrygold unsalted butter at Trader Joe's:
8 oz coffee
1 Tbsp grassfed unsalted butter
1 tsp coconut oil
1/2 tsp vanilla
Pour the coffee in a rocket blender cup. Add the butter, coconut oil, and vanilla.
Blend it all together until creamy, about thirty seconds.
