Butter

When I die and go to heaven, I will be able to eat as much butter as I like.  When we were growing up my mother's answer to any vegetable that we didn't want to eat was "put lots of butter and salt and pepper on it".  She was a good cook.....sometimes.  She didn't own one cookbook, not one!  I have a whole cupboard full of them. She would open the fridge and start cooking.  Sometimes things would turn out and sometimes not.  And we tended to have the same foods, and standard vegetables all the time, cooked the same way.  One of my new favorite vegetables is sweet potato.  We never had that once when I was growing up, and when my step-mother was visiting recently we had a discussion about vegetables and she said that she never had sweet potatos until the last few years.  Maybe it has gained only popularity recently?

Butter has gotten me into all kinds of trouble and when I started to make changes to a plant based diet I was most afraid of never having butter again. But I bought some Earth Balance http://www.earthbalancenatural.com/
and haven't looked back since.  My husband was a margarine snob and when I brought the Earth Balance home he had that scared look on his face, but he loves now too.  It has a nice light yellow color, it is great for baking, sauteing and melts beautifully on toast.  Any recipe that calls for butter you can substitute Earth Balance. Note of caution:  watch that you don't pick up Smart Balance by mistake.  They are generally beside each other on the shelf and Smart Balance is not vegan, nor does it lend itself well to substituting butter in recipes.