Homage to Blinky and Butter

This week’s blog post is inspired by and dedicated to my late dog Blinky, who passed away a few days ago. Like me, Blinky ate a lactose-free diet… except for butter. She loved butter. My husband and I discovered her penchant for the stuff one night when we set our dinner on the coffee table, went back to the kitchen to get something, and returned to find bite marks on the stick of butter that we’d left out. As any dog lover will attest, it’s impossible to be upset about your dog doing something so darn cute.

Butter is the one dairy product that I still eat, and I eat it with gusto. For a while, I tried to avoid cooking with butter, having been brainwashed into believing butter is bad for you. I used olive oil instead. But then a nutritionist encouraged me to eat a variety of fats, including coconut oil, ghee and butter. I couldn’t believe it. This woman knew I was lactose-intolerant and she was recommending I eat butter? Hooray!

Now I do switch up my cooking fats, for instance, using coconut oil for frying plantains, peanut oil for stir-fries, bacon fat for browning meats, and olive oil for quick vegetable sautés. But my go-to is butter. Nothing works better for scrambled or fried eggs, and I wouldn’t dream of putting anything else on a baked potato. The amount of lactose in butter doesn’t bother my stomach (I mean, unless I were to eat a whole pound cake or something). And eating butter has hugely increased my quality of life.

It’s no wonder that Blinky sank her little teeth into that delicious yellow brick. I hope that right now she’s eating butter to her heart’s content. Mommy loves you, Blink.

In loving memory of Blinky (2003-2016)