Can't Believe It's Not Butter!

When Jefferson and I were first married, we had an ongoing controversy of which was better, butter or margarine. Let me explain something to you: my husband is what I call a "pure-ist" in that he can't mix his foods and sauce is a big no-no. Love always asks me why I would spoil the flavor of a meat by adding bbq sauce to it. I on the other hand, I mix and slather and layer my foods, combining the flavors and dipping the entire schlew into sauce of some kind or other, be it as rich as gravy or as simple as ranch dressing. Knowing this, could you guess who liked which one? Yep. My husband was 100% a butter boy and I a margarine mama.

We kept up the rouse, teasing each other constantly about the difference in flavor and priceing, etc for several months into our marriage, going so far as to take a poll at a family reunion! (Mom and Granny both said that butter was better but margarine fit the budget.)

After a while though, I decided to be a good wife and sacrifice a couple of cents to get my husband what he'd grown up with and enjoyed his entire life. I picked out a brand that I'd seen at my parents house and started to buy that brand only.

One day, almost an entire year later, while at Jefferson's parents house for dinner, his mom pulled out a bar of the same brand I used for Jefferson. "I don't usually use margarine in this recipe," she said, "but I ran out of butter a few days ago and haven't been to the grocery store since."
"Oh no, that brand is butter,"I blurted out.
"Really?" she said. "I always thought this was margarine...?"
"No, it's butter," I said. "I use that same brand at home for Jefferson."

A while back (maybe a month or two ago...wow, it has been a while) our neighbors, Brennan and Sarah, invited us over for dinner. Brennan was cooking, and knocked on our door to ask if he could borrow a cube of butter. I rushed to the freezer and pulled out a whole box of my butter and handed it to him.
"Knock yourself out," I said.
"...Uh, this is margarine...Got any butter in that freezer?"
A snort escaped from Jefferson as I tried to hurriedly explain that it was butter, I'd been using it for almost a year and it worked like a charm. Love continued to chuckle and I felt heat rushing up my neck.
I spun on him. "What's so funny?" I demanded.
"Gen-hee-hee haw-haw-ny," Jefferson said, nearly in tears, "Brennan's rig-ha-hee-t. That's ma-ha-ha-rgarine. A-ha-ha." By this point, Brennan too was chuckling and I was furious.

As soon as the door shut behind our neighbor, I nearly exploded.
"What's so gosh-darn funny about this?" I said. "I've been buying this brand of margarine for the past year, thinking it was butter, and now, after I've told your mother and our neighbor that 'oh no, that's butter' now, of all times, you decide to tell me that all along it was margarine?!!"
"No, hee hee haw haw. That's not the funny part," Love said. "The funny part is that all this time you were trying to do something nice for me, thinking you were buying butter, and I thought I was doing something nice for you by letting you buy margarine!"

And for those of you wanting to know, the brand of margarine I was buying that I thought was butter for almost a year was Imperial, and it's the closest tasting thing to butter that's a not-butter-margarine I've ever had.