Clarendon Hills Whipped Butter

Butter. I love butter. I suppose that's a given -- most people are at least fond of butter, but I? I write poems about butter, I dream about butter, I find myself constantly thinking about it at inappropriate times and in strange places, like on the El.... I'm stretching. I'm not a butter fiend, by any means, and I don't think I've had a butter-based dream for quite some time, now, but in any case: butter and I go way back. We're pals. Oh, sometimes we get into the occasional squabble, and I swear never to speak to it again, but a few days later? I'm back with my knife and bread, ready to kiss and make up.
Of course, we're not talking about any old kind of butter here. No, if I'm going to smother something in butter, it's got to be goooood butter. Land-O-Lakes is fine and all, if you're having a butter emergency, but my preference? Clarendon Hills Whipped Butter. Call me needlessly fancy if you must, but I love this butter. It comes wrapped in a sheet of parchment paper in an irregularly shaped 8-ounce block, with no other indications of measurement. It's old-fashioned, really, because my whole life I've been accustomed to standard butter: four neat rectangles wrapped in parchment, stamped by the tablespoon, and snugly packed into a bright yellow box. Until Clarendon Hills, I'd never seen anything different. It is nothing like standard butter, and it tastes nothing like it, either.
This butter is made in Wisconsin, and labeled "Wis. Grade AA." Not being an expert on food codes, I did a little sleuthing and found, unsurprisingly, that in Wisconsin, Grade AA butter indicates a superior breed of butter. It possesses the highly pleasing butter flavor required, has only a slight (I taste none, but I'm not a butter expert, by any means) taste of feed and/or culture. For comparison, Grade B butter is described thusly: "It may possess any of the following flavors to a slight degree: malty, musty, neutralizer, scorched, utensil, weed and whey. It may possess any of the following flavors to a definite degree: acid, aged, bitter, coarse, flat, smothered, storage and old cream." Oooo, bitter-acid-storage butter! I love that stuff! I just can't get enough of that scorched old cream taste! Clearly, Grade AA is the "creme de la creme" of butters, at least by Wisconsin's standard.
They sell this stuff at Treasure Island, which is a great "European-style" grocery store in Chicago. There's one right in D's office building, so although it's a bit more expensive than Dominick's (which is just shy of out-of-the way on the walk home) he'll stop there sometimes after work to get us some food -- especially if we need butter. They have a small but thorough produce section and lots of different types of hard-to-find foods (we were able, by the way, to purchase some olivada -- black olive paste -- there, as I originally thought.) Unfortunately, they don't have a functioning website (it's been "under construction" for quite some time) but if you find that you're lacking something strange and generically European in your pantry, they most likely have it there. And they carry Clarendon Hills butter, which makes it worthy of a special trip. Just for the butter. And if you walk there, you might be able to work off the calories that you'd consume after baking some cookies with this rich, creamy, Grade AA butter. By the way: while it's wonderful for baking, it's good in any recipe that calls for butter or margarine. Try it on these thin chocolate chip cookies, then move on to baked dijon chicken (substitute it for the oil) and smashed potatoes. Speaking of potatoes: just throw a hunk of this stuff on top of a baked potato with a salad on the side and you have yourself the tastiest quick meal known to man. I'm serious.