Wood Butter

I recently thought back to what my spoon guy told me when I first met him. Wait...doesn't everyone have a spoon guy?  No?  Well, I met my spoon guy at the Yellow Daisy Festival, which is an arts and crafts festival that happens in September at Stone Mountain.  We have a pretty steady relationship.  I visit him every year at the Yellow Daisy Festival and I buy a hand-carved, wooden spoon.  Not just any type of spoon....a LEFT HANDED SPOON!  Yes, there are spoons made just for us lefties.  Angled just so to make cooking that much easier for us.  So much better than those horrible left handed scissors that teachers tried to make us use in elementary school.  If you were lucky, your teacher might have had one pair that you and the other two lefties in the class had to share.  Survival of the fittest dictated that you adapt to the righty scissors, which I did. I felt dirty and swore I would never again bow down to the man that is the right handed world.  But I digress. This post isn't about the unfairness of the world to lefties.  It's about wood butter.

Back to my spoon guy.  When I bought my first spoon, he told me that wooden utensils tend to dry out.  When they need a "drink", lightly sand them and then rub them with mineral oil.  I believe I left the festival and went straight to the store to buy these two items.  I wanted to baby my spoon.  Each year, I go back to him, get a new spoon, and get the same lecture about giving my spoons a drink.  And I hate to admit that over time, I have begun to neglect my spoons.  They were all dried out and rough to the touch and I really didn't want to take the 4 minutes to give them their drinks!

I came across the following pin on Pinterest- DIY Wood Butter.  A wood conditioner, if you will, for wooden utensils and cutting boards made with two ingredients: beeswax and mineral oil.  I could hear my spoons from the kitchen calling out (in teeny tiny voices) "We want wood butter!"  I'm not a savvy shopper.  I can't think of where to buy beeswax and mineral oil off the top of my head, so I wander over to Amazon.com.  Within 2 business days, I had my ingredients and made my wood butter.  The process was simple enough.  Following the girl's recipe in the above link, I melted and mixed my ingredients and poured them into Mason Jars.  It made a mess though and I thought I ruined my canning funnel and my 5 qt. mixing bowl I used to melt the beeswax in.  I could not get the re-solidified beeswax off of those two items.  After letting them soak in soapy water overnight, two hand washes, and a run through the dish washer, they were as good as new. After I let the wood butter cool, I put some on a clean, dry paper towel and buffed it into one of my spoons.  I swear it said, "Ahhhhhhhhh.....that hit the spot."  He looked all shiny and happy and hydrated.  Take a look at the picture.  Don't you agree that my spoons look happy?

So, to see if anyone is actually reading this.... I ended up with 6 jars of wood butter.  I don't need 6 jars of wood butter because a little goes a long way. I will give away 3 jars to interested people.  Just let me know and I'll find a way to get it to you.  PS- it makes a wonderful lotion for dry skin.  Absorbs fast and lasts forever! (Ok, not really forever, but a really, really long time).