Last night, as I was watching my stepmother prepare supper, I spied a plate — not a dish nor a bowl — but a plate of melted butter. She then proceeded to dip slices of French bread in the pool of butter, coating them completely from edge to edge before popping them in the toasted oven.

Most turkey prep is designed to compensate for its lack of fat, and therefore, flavour. Dry brining is the best way to season your bird from the inside out, but for the juiciest, most delicious meat, you’ve gotta add some fat — and there’s no better fat than butter.

As a person who keeps at least 1kg of butter on hand at all times, I’m constantly cycling blocks of the stuff between my freezer, fridge and butter dish. Recently, though, I found myself in an unthinkable predicament: I was out of butter. I dug around in the back of my freezer, and behind a half-empty bag of frozen dumplings and some chicken stock, I found one last box.

Garlic bread is not a complicated concept; it’s bread with garlic on it. But, within those two ingredients alone, there is a lot of room for variation. I’ve tinkered around with both the bread and garlic portions of the pungent carb (butter, however is nonnegotiable), and I have arrived at what I believe to be quite an ideal situation.

Morel mushrooms are two things: Delicious and expensive. If you are going to shell out the required dough (or go through the trouble of foraging them), you want to make sure you get to enjoy every bit of their rich, meaty flavour.

Alison Roman's salted butter chocolate chunk shortbread cookies are everywhere. Bon Appétit, Eater, Nylon, Smitten Kitchen and The New York Times have covered them in glowing detail; The Cookies pop up on my Instagram discover feed literally every day. The best recipes are more than the sum of their parts, but the sheer volume of breathless, googly-eyed reviews suggest that a concerning number of people have lived deprived, salted-butter-cookie-less lives until now.

Steamed edamame, sprinkled with a little salt, is a fine snack or appetiser, but edmame that is sauteed in butter and garlic, and then sprinkled with some seasoning, is impossible to stop eating.

Hot buttered rum is so good in theory, but in practice, it always disappoints. Slurping a film of butter off your top lip is a bit much, even for those of us who would eat a stick of butter like a banana were society ready to accept us.

Steak has always been my favourite protein, and I tend to favour cuts of the bone-in variety. But once the meat has been consumed and the martini has been polished off, it always seems kind of sad to toss the bone, which is too small to make an appreciable amount of broth.

Have you noticed that some of Australia’s favourite baked goods, such as croissants and buttery biscuits, have been creeping up in price? This becomes less surprising when one considers that globally, the price of butter has risen by around 60% over the past year.

Today's kids have thousands of apps and educational programmes that tell them how to eat healthily. When I was growing up, we learned the Food Pyramid. We categorised grub into four food groups and that was pretty much it. But look back a bit farther, and dietary advice gets a little weirder: in the early 1950s, there were seven food groups, and one was just for butter.

It seems as though I am forever buying butter. I'm not complaining at all -- having a lot of butter around makes me feel warm and safe -- but I often find myself unwrapping a lot, depending on the type of projects I have going on.

Though I like to bake, I don't consider myself a "serious baker". Sure, I make my own pie crust and can bake a pretty decent loaf of bread, but one thing I have wanted to mess with is puff pastry.

Only 20 years ago butter was the public villain – contributing to raised cholesterol levels and public concern over an increased risk of heart disease. Now this public perception seems to have been reversed, and reality cooking shows seem to use butter in every recipe. But what has caused this shift in perceptions and is it based on scientific evidence?

A roux by any other name is still a roux, but maybe that other name should be "fat and flour paste thickener", because the fancy French name seems to put people off.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to a very buttery and savoury edition of Will It Sous Vide?, the column where I make things with my immersion circulator.

Thin, watery sauces are just plain unappealing, but they aren't quite the disaster they seem. To thicken up as sad sauce, you just need butter, cornstarch and time.

Good-looking food tastes better, and playful presentation can make dinner that much more enjoyable. Edible butter candles perform double duty by adding ambience and a healthy substantial serving of sexy, tasty whimsy.

I'm an equal opportunity cookie eater and, while I love a thin, crispy cookie, I firmly believe there's a time and a place for a soft, fluffy one as well. (The time is always and the place is my mouth.) According to delish, the secret to getting soft, cloud-like cookies every time is simple: just replace the butter with cream cheese.