Butter

Craig: Welcome to our weekly Philly Food Chat Throw-down! I have been racking up the dining miles by the hour since we last spoke. Went to a rollicking birthday party for a friend in the back box dining room of Lee How Fook, which was shabbier than I remember, and noisier than I remember, but also wonderfully tasty, because I got the honors (with my pal Wilson) to order all my favorites for the room - Buddha rolls; sui mei; crispy noodles with beef, black bean sauce and Chinese greens; pea leaves; chicken-asparagus hot pot, and likely the best wonton soup in C-town.

Hats off to Bal Arneson, one of our new favorite Indian cookbook authors, for creating such a creamy, savory sauce from a handful of ingredients. You could toss in fresh peas to make this a one-pot meal.   Chicken With Almond Butter 4 to 6 servings 4 to 5 medium cloves garlic 1 or 2 ripe tomatoes 2 jarred roasted red bell peppers 13/4 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breast halves 2 tablespoons grapeseed oil 1 tablespoon fennel seed 1 tablespoon cumin seed 1 tablespoon ground coriander Kosher salt Freshly ground black pepper 1/4 cup almond butter 1. Finely chop the garlic to yield 2 tablespoons.

The world is already divided into camps of Skippy and Jif, hydrogenated and natural, crunchy and smooth, salted and unsalted. And these days, as more regional peanut butter producers pop up, people might be likely to choose their butters by proximity. Which is one reason Mercury Amodio decided to produce her own "house" peanut butter last fall when she opened PBandU in Wayne, a sit-down restaurant that serves peanut butter "any way you like it. " "It was very important to us that we make our own in-house," she says.

Norma "Duffy" Lyon, 81, who sculpted butter into likenesses of cows, Elvis Presley, and even Jesus for the Iowa State Fair, has died. A woman who answered the phone Monday at Kruse-Phillips Funeral Home in Tama, Iowa, confirmed Ms. Lyon died Sunday. She was known to fairgoers as the "Butter cow lady. " She was pregnant with her seventh child in 1959 when she produced her first bovine butter sculpture, a 600-pound cow, for the fair. A rural Toledo homemaker, she went on to sculpt a butter cow every year thereafter until 2006, when she retired.

CAULIFLOWER SOUP WITH FLORETS AND DILL 1/4 cup butter 2-1/4 cups sliced Spanish onions 3-1/4 pounds cauliflower chopped into small pieces 1 quart milk 1-1/2 cups water 1 cup heavy cream 1 tablespoon salt White pepper to taste 1/2 bunch dill wrapped in cheesecloth 1 cup cauliflower florets 2 teaspoons chopped fresh dill Salt to taste Melt butter in a pan, then add onions and cook till...

Mark Bitterman calls himself a "selmelier," a made-up word meant to evoke his wish to do for salt what sommeliers do for wine: educate, surprise, delight. Co-owner of the Meadow, a specialty food and flower shop with branches in New York and Portland, Ore., he has written a book called Salted: A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes (Ten Speed, $35). This handsome tribute to salt outlines its history, varieties, method of manufacture, and proper use. He hopes to help Americans relearn what they know about salt and how they use it. Bitterman thinks the government's sodium recommendation - 2,300 milligrams daily for the typical person, 1,500 milligrams for others - is a good thing because it will get people thinking about salt.

CULT LEADERS are the pied-pipers of America, leading the outcast, the despondent, and sometimes the highly intelligent off into the dark, isolated fringes of society. And then there's Rick Alan Ross, poking around in that darkness with a flashlight. From his eclectic office in a former cracker factory in Trenton, Ross, 58, runs the Rick A. Ross Institute, a nonprofit Internet archive on "destructive cults" and "controversial groups and movements. " Attorneys, universities and the media often go to Ross for explanations when seemingly benign groups go off the rails, and parents turn to him when their children fall under a cult's spell.

Dinner at the Kensington home of John Vick and Amanda Jaffe is as simple as roast chicken, mashed potatoes, salad, and biscuits - and as complicated as farm-raised, sustainably grown, homemade, and locally sourced. Jaffe uses chicken from Griggstown Quail Farm outside Princeton, unaltered by hormones or antibiotics. Vick mashes the All Blue potatoes, a variety that produces colorful flesh as well as skin, from Tuscarora Organic Growers in Hustontown, Pa., adding butter from Hometown Provisions in Lancaster County and whole milk from Trickling Springs Creamery in Chambersburg, Pa. For his biscuits, Vick blends heirloom cornmeal from Rineer Family Farms in Lancaster and buttermilk from Maplehofe Dairy in Quarryville, Pa. The salad greens, baby arugula, and baby spinach were grown hydroponically at Woodland Produce in Fairton, N.J., by a farmer who recently got a grant from the USDA to install photovoltaic cells in order to run his greenhouses on solar energy.

At the same time that you're buttering your morning toast, you also may be slathering it with the tiny amounts of the flame retardant PBDE. In a study to be published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers found that each of 10 samples of butter purchased at five Dallas grocery stores contained various types of PBDEs. Although it was a limited sampling and the amounts were small enough to be measured in trillionths of a gram per gram of butter, lead researcher Arnold Schecter said the concentration was the highest found so far in food.

This reinvention of the pot pie is a perfect vehicle for leftover Thanksgiving turkey. It starts in a skillet with vegetables and turkey, then is topped with buttered bread and finished in the oven: a simple, cozy, post-holiday meal.   Skillet Turkey and Mushroom Pot Pie 1. Preheat oven to 425. In a large, ovenproof nonstick skillet, melt 2 tablespoons of the butter. Add the onion, mushrooms, and carrots and season lightly with salt and pepper. Cover and cook over high heat, stirring once, until the vegetables are just softened, about 1 minute.