Biscuits for Breakfast

The best days start with biscuits hot from the oven. Why more people don't make them, I don't know. A pan of biscuits is ready for the oven before the oven gets hot.

Here's a pan of biscuits ready to bake.



These biscuits are made with canola oil and hand formed. That's why they're so easy to make.

Biscuits

1 cup unbleached flour
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/3 cup cooking oil (canola, sunflower, even olive oil)
2/3 cup buttermilk.

Pre-heat the oven to 475 degrees.

Put all the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl and whisk them together. Put the oil and buttermilk in a one-cup measure and, without stirring them together, pour the liquid into the dry ingredients. Stir to incorporate the dry ingredients.

Pinch off a biscuit-size piece of dough and, using your fingers, shape it into a disk about 1/2" to 3/4" thick. Place the disk in an ungreased baking pan. Repeat until the dough is gone.

Bake for 15 minutes or so, depending on the size of your biscuits. Bigger ones take longer than little ones.

The original recipe called for rolling and cutting 12 biscuits from this amount of dough. That size is dinky. The rolling and cutting is not needed. Pauline, my sister-in-law, and I reminisced recently about our grandmothers hand forming biscuits. Pauline's grandma rolled the piece of dough between her palms to make a ball that she flattened.



Here they are, ready for butter and strawberry jam. I baked these for 17 minutes.

What The Heck

Last week I did some things I shouldn't have and blew out both wrists. Every time I bent a wrist, pain shot through it. Pain is a powerful deterrent so I did only essential things, such as brush my teeth.

The enforced idleness was boring until I remembered a new jigsaw puzzle waiting in the closet for just such an occasion. What the heck! I gave myself permission to play and rest.

The first part went quickly.



Then it mostly came down to a big red pot, a bigger orange pot, and a mess of greenery. Progress slowed.


Yesterday, just before supper, I placed the last piece. It was orange.


Why didn't I watch movies or read a book? Too passive. I needed the illusion of accomplishing something. Three days of rest have almost restored my wrists and that's the real accomplishment.

Four Black Crows

Four black crows walked into our yard this afternoon. They strutted by the chicken yard like hoodlums asserting their presence in the neighborhood. The chickens looked askance, then went on pecking in the dirt.

The crows swaggered on as a loosely-organized group, checking out the garden area. As I watched out the living room window, a male suddenly mounted a female. It was over in seconds. The male sauntered away. The female ruffled her feathers, paused, and shook her head as if asking, "What hit me?"

I unintentionally interrupted the crows' tour by stepping outside with my camera. That was Annie's cue to chase the crows away, just to show me how much she cares.

They'll be back. They always come back.

Big Thunderstorm

We're having a huge, crashing thunderstorm. Such storms always remind me of one of my favorite childhood poems.

The Woodpecker

The woodpecker pecked out a little round hole
And made him a house in a telephone pole.
One day when I watched he poked out his head,
And he had on a hood and a collar of red.

When the streams of rain pour out of the sky,
And the sparkles of lightning go flashing by,
And the big, big sheets of thunder roll,
He can snuggle back in the telephone pole.

Elizabeth Roberts

This storm is more than welcome. The garden is dry, the flowerbeds are dry, everything is dry. We rejoice and snuggle back in our little house, watching nature's temper tantrum.

Elbow Room

We are busting out of our limited storage space. Only one car can be in the double garage. My potting bench takes up the other car space. The lawnmower and tiller are outside, covered with tarps. Tools are crammed into one side of the chicken house as well as in various garage spaces. The truck is parked by the wood pile in front of the house. You get the picture. Tacky.

We need a central place to keep the necessities of country life - truck, equipment, tools, potting stuff. Grant looked into various options. We finally contracted with an Esh builder to put a 24'X24' metal building in the southwest corner of the pasture. It hurt me to sacrifice part of the going-native area, but there's simply no where else to put an outbuilding.

Last Thursday a bulldozer built the gravel pad, driveway, and drainage channel. Construction of the building will begin in October. The building will be cream colored with antique red roof and trim.


This photo looks south toward the windbreak. The path from the house to the pasture passes through the red gate between two cedar trees. Only a few wildflowers were lost from this mostly grassy section. The grading stopped just short of where the best stands of grasses and forbs begins on the left.

Here's a link to the Esh website www.eshqs.com/. Our building will be much smaller than the ones on their homepage, but you can see the colors and type of construction.

Rattlesnakes for Supper

The bush bean seeds I bought turned out to be pole beans. They just keep growing and vining, but produce no flowers. Desperate for fresh green beans, I raided the rattlesnake beans, which I grow for dried beans. They are also good as green beans, but are true "string beans," in that they have to be de-stringed.

They must be called rattlesnake beans because of the red mottling on the pods and the distinctive markings on the dried beans.



Raccoons raided our sweet corn just as the ears were maturing. Somehow those lazy critters know exactly when to check the corn. Dennis managed to salvage a few immature, but undamaged, ears.



The rattlesnakes became the basis for classic green beans almondine, somewhat altered by the addition of a minced shallot.



The corn ears were so long they wouldn't fit in the pot, so Dennis broke them in half. Seven minutes in boiling water and they were done, very tender, and sweet.



Dennis was, as always, pleased with our simple supper.


Afterward, we ate Blue Bell vanilla ice cream. I had chocolate syrup on mine. Dennis stuck with simplicity.

A Walk on The Wild Side

This morning I could no longer resist viewing up close the golden blossoms in our pasture, so I suited up for action. (Suiting up involves copious amounts of Skin So Soft and sulfur powder on my body and generous sprays of Off on my jeans and long-sleeved shirt. I finish by donning Dennis' knee high rubber boots and a straw hat.)

I made a bee-line for the greyheaded coneflowers.



On the way I passed some rattlesnake masters.



And closed in on one of the seed heads.



Immature milkweed pods are beautiful, too.



But nothing currently blooming compares with Kansas gayfeather for dignified grandeur.



A late-blooming clump of black-eyed susans caught my eye. Most of the black-eyed susans have already finished blooming.















Other wildflowers in bloom are the scurfpea, purple prairie clover, and hoary vervain. But the heat was building, so I headed back to the house, passing a great spangled fritillary feeding on a coneflower on the way.


When we moved here in 1976 this pasture was nothing but brome grass. Dreaming of restoring the pasture to its native state, I gathered the seeds of native wildflowers and grasses from local prairie remnants and scattered the seeds over our pasture. Year after year I added more seeds and, when we had the leaky pond bulldozed, the soil conservation people arranged to have native prairie seeds drilled into the disturbed earth. Now the pasture is home to dozens of prairie forbes and grasses, and my dream is close to realization.