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

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.

Keep telling yourself that.

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Growing Versions

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