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With Butter

I am reading Six Seasons : A New Way with Vegetables and found this intriguing idea for combining pickled vegetables with butter.

Pickled Vegetable Butter Stay away from bread-and-butter pickles and the other basic cucumber-based pickles. Focus instead on a mix of vegetable pickles—such as carrots, green beans, fennel, radish, turnips, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts—which will give you more flavor and complexity. If you like heat, you can add some pickled peppers to the mix.

It brought to mind a marketplace in Athens where vendors sold pickled vegetables of different kinds. During our stay there, J and I went around to this place almost everyday and bought something interesting to eat for dinner at the hotel. The pickled vegetables featured in our meal everyday - it was absolutely delightful and we could not have enough. Incorporating this lovely dish into butter makes sense - bring the flavors to a toast (something I did not think about at all). 

Butter here is a conveyor of flavor and taste and brings things to toast that would have otherwise never made it there. It made me think of other options that could work just as well once I get comfortable of with the different ideas McFadden has in this book - green garlic butter is next on my list. I have a garlic planted in my yard from last year that should be back up sometime between spring and summer. Then there is watercress butter that I think would be a winner. 



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