Apparently It Is Easy To Make Butter When A Ninja Is Involved – A Thanksgiving Mishap

Lightly sweetened butter, that was supposed to be whipped cream.  I poured off the liquid already.

Everyone knows that whipped cream is a requirement for pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving.

It’s pumpkin pie season!  My favorite.  I didn’t have ready made whipped cream, so I whipped out the carton of heavy whipping cream I keep on reserve for chocolate ganache and whipped up a batch. LOL. See how punny I am?

I love this time of year.  Pulling out old family recipes, taking time not to be stressed about the world and just be thankful in this sacred space.  It’s a special day of magic really.  The kind that only love and gratitude can create.  I like this day.

ANYway… When the need arises, I usually whip up little batches of whipped cream with one of my small food processors. (Only the real stuff for me.)  It’s a great way to cheat at all sorts of things, like whipped cream and cream gravy. I have cooked from scratch all my life, but I have never really been able to master a rue. How do I get around that?  Blend some flour, spices and milk in a blender and you’ve got instant cream gravy or stew thickener. Corn starch too. I love me my food processors!

Truth be told, I’ve been through a lot of them. I love frozen fruit smoothies too. Been making them since I got out of college and could buy my first machine. However, I like the all fruit kind and I don’t water them down with ice. Which is actually harder on the machines. Ice shatters easily.  Frozen fruit does not.  Those drink wands? I burnt out three of them. Along with several small food choppers and blenders. Then there was the small Cuisinart I brutalized until it finally had plastic bits cracking off it from the sheer vibrational impact of frozen fruit blending in a machine that was never designed for what I was putting it through. But my frozen goodie product was yum!

Later I finally got a Magic Bullet. OMG! I loved it! Still have it too. (If you don’t want yours, I’ll take it!)  However, you can only make a small bit at a time.  And my kids love smoothies too.

So then came the opportunity to own a Ninja. Sam’s Club had one left on clearance for half price. It’s one of the smaller models, but I took one look and grabbed it. Hell yeah. Strawberry/Spinach smoothie tonight!

It’s a little finicky, but my Ninja works well. The larger model might be less finicky.  Mine’s really designed to make the smoothies that you water down with ice. And if you do, you will have no trouble with it. However, as you already know, I don’t like adding ice. Probably doesn’t help that I don’t have an ice maker. But I did figure out that if I toss in the strawberries and other frozen fruit in alone, before adding spinach or anything else, it will powder them nicely and then I can easily add my yogurt and greens. But not until then. (It helps to use sliced frozen strawberries too, btw.) Once you have that figured out, it works like a dream blending up a whole pitcher of smoothie at a time. 😀

So back to whipped cream. A small food processor will help you whip up the good stuff in no time without pulling out your blender and all the clean up. (I’m all for practical and the least amount of work.)  Add your cream, a tad bit of honey for sweetener and blend until it looks right. Voila. Whipped cream.

Along come Ninja. This is the first time I’ve used it for whipped cream. In about 20-30 seconds I had whipped cream. Upon tasting, though, hubby didn’t feel it was sweet enough. So I added more honey and blended away. About another thirty seconds later, I had chunks in my cream and by another 30, it was butter. It wasn’t until I opened it up that I realized what was going on.

Stupid Ninja, I wanted whipped cream for my pie and now I don’t have any at all.  So now I have instead a delicate sweetened cream butter I’ll have to decide how I want to use. Grandma Leona would have been jealous.