Taking a longcut, one batch of biscuits at a time.

It is way to cliche to complain about being busy. I am busy because I am privileged to have a job (which I like) and two healthy active kids (who I like). However, these past couple of years have been strenuous. I concede that I have taken certain (i.e. hundreds of) shortcuts to make things easier. Most of these shortcuts I am at peace with, (no vacuuming,wearing unmatched socks on a regular basis, not insisting on nightly baths and no homemade bread ...well, um, that never happened anyway). There are hundreds of these shortened steps, I am sure, that I have gradually succumbed to accepting. However, one of the shortcuts I am not so happy about has been cutting out baking and cutting down on cooking from scratch. Cooking from scratch still happens but lots of shortcuts have been thrown into the mix which have also short changed my joy doing it.

In the process of saving time (initially to keep the impatient pleas from kids to a dull roar), I'd cut out the step (and pleasure) of baking biscuits to go with the re-heated soup, for example. It was a little thing to be sure, and I have always been far far away from being self sufficient, but tea biscuits (the one baked good I really nail) just fell off the edge. Even cookies that needed to be baked for school functions were either being bought or farmed out.

However, recently, at the end of a cool, crisp day in which the kids had been active all day, we were heating up a stew, that only partially was our creation, and it dawned on me that biscuits would make this stew more satisfying. I hauled out the dusty (and floury) cookbook and gathered the ingredients (which I hadn't even needed to buy since the cookie making flurry last December) and made some biscuits. Within 30 minutes, we had fluffy and crispy, yet melty biscuits. Everyone was pleased. The smell was pleasing, the taste sure was and the feeling that at least one long cut was incorporated into my day certainly was.

So, biscuits aren't exactly healthy, although they aren't dipped in chocolate or anything, but the ritual of working with ingredients, the remembering of the exact consistency they need to be and the eating of them (most of all) has been a good reminder that some routes are just not worth shortening (not a pun).

Comments

Keep telling yourself that.

We talk to ourselves everyday, all day (and night) for the whole of our lives. We started talking to ourselves before we knew we were a self, we forget what we said because we forget everything from before...when we were too young and busy developing our brain to remember those early years. There is still lingering residue of long forgotten conversations I have had with myself as a toddler sitting around in the crevices...sloughing off occasionally into words I tell myself still. We talk non-stop, and not just with dialogue. Our goosebumps communicate to us, our tingly feelings, our neurons, our peripheal vision. They are all submitting data into our self and expecting us to react, respond or all to often, expecting what they are sending us will be ignored. After all that talking, you'd think we'd know what we think about most things, but occasionally we are stumped. Unless we stop what we are doing and really concentrate sometimes that voice(s) ...

the words fell out

Despite being an introvert, I do often process big life events (and many many small ones) out loud by verbally hashing out my thoughts with whoever will put up with me. But this morning when I woke up to the big red blotch on the U.S. map...all my /the words fell out. They fell out unsaid, unformed. Got to work and probably , in another time, would have annoyed my co-workers, dominating the conversation with my verbal extrusions, but not today. I just mutely stared across at them and nodded. My dad came for lunch. Normally, we relish a good political diatribe, especially when we feel sure of our perspective, but this time, all I could do was munch on fries and marvel at all the unarticulated thoughts that I was not even bothering to retrieve. The silence inside me was noticeable. Social media was awash with reactions and I just looked away. I couldn't bear to read one word about it. I was not receptive to any reactions, accusations, reflections, words...

I entered August without you.

I won't visit you this month. You won't call. I will raid your garden and you won't get any of the vegetables. I will make plans without telling you about them. We'll go to the store and not buy you one single thing. Whole books will be read and I will not tell you which ones. I will watch movies and not inform you. The nasturiums will ripen. Last month was different. I changed my schedule and took time off work to be with you. I dropped all kinds of plans for us to be together. You sent me messages, I received them. I picked up food that I thought you would like at the store and sent you pictures of every beautiful thing I saw. I sang with you. We watched the Great Canadian Baking Show. You chose the recipe for the garlic scape pesto and gave me instructions for making the gooseberry jam. I am in August without you. You are in July.

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