I'm learning a lot about buttermilk. Yesterday I was making some pancakes and my freshly purchased buttermilk with an April 23 pull date had little white grainy blobs in it -- which after my last experience with questionable buttermilk -- made me quite nervous. So I called my cooking consultant, Auntie Janet to ask her (after the last time she said I had a family malady called IFOSM ("intense fear of sour milk") and her answer was basically, not sure about the lumps but there should be no problem with it.

I decided to call the dairy. Phil, in the lab, had almost the same answer which didn't increase my confidence. "How do you know if buttermilk is bad?" I asked. "The same way you can tell if other foods are bad, taste and smell," he says, helpfully. I pointed out that buttermilk was a little funky to begin with not to mention that people with IFOSM are not about to be drinking buttermilk. He agreed that most people use buttermilk in cooking and don't know what it's supposed to taste like.

I made the pancakes anyway. We ate them and they tasted great.