Two Ingredient Biscuits

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/quick-biscuits/detail.aspx
First off, allrecipes.com is amazing.  They have submitted, rated, and perfectly categorized recipes to find just what your looking for with all the feedback you need.  So, I've been trying to get rid of some dairy that is close to it's expiration date, including some heavy cream.  So I used the fancy, convenient ingredient search and came across the above recipe for two ingredient biscuits.  It is so fast and simple I was able to make it during only two commercial breaks of What Not to Wear.  I followed some of the reviews and did not knead or roll it, but dropped it by spoonful onto a greased baking sheet.  I also added a pinch of sugar and more heavy cream than it called for.
The result was a heavenly biscuit that softly crumbles into large chunks when you try to eat it and begs to be covered in honey, butter, or jam.  I was able to put my accidental butter on it and it was awesome.  The biscuits by themselves are homey and delicious, but perhaps a little dry until you get to the middle.  They seem perfect for breakfast, dinner, or an afternoon tea.  I've had them sitting on my counter for a day and already at least 8 are missing.

My Childhood

Saturday morning, vegging on food network.  Aarti pinched the meat between her chapati protected fingers.  Why is it so hard for chefs who have their own TV show to not be really annoying.  She pushed the bite into her mouth and pleasurably whined, "You guys!.....I'm seven years old all over again."

And, suddenly, so I am.

I'm sitting on the couch eating honey nut cheerios, sweet and crunchy, from my dad's star trek mug while watching the King and I.  I'm watching my church's pastor give the family mass homily as I eat unconsecrated eucharistic bread my mom had made extra of for me, the honey, whole wheat flat bread sticking to the roof of my mouth.  My hands are freezing as I rub the flakey ice off the outside of a plastic popsicle tube, melting the blue sugary liquid, the slurps looking like veins as they travel up the plastic.  I'm chewing waffles that I helped make, wincing with each fluffy bite in anticipation of egg shells, looking across the table to see my sister has swallowed her loose tooth.  There's a steaming baked potato in front of me, topped with steamed broccoli and melting cheddar cheese, dinner in one complete little combination.  I'm eating purple salty hard boiled eggs (no yolks, they taste like side walk chalk, believe me, I know) because the easter food coloring leaked through the cracks.  I feel sick to my stomach as I eat a tenth super-delicious, super-rich piece of my grandma's seven layer cookies.  My mouth fills with joy as I place the flakey pie crust filled with thick chocolate pudding into it.

Making Accidental Butter

The other day I was making a refrigerator cake, the easiest,  most delicious edible summer arts and crafts project of all time.  To make, you simply whip some heavy cream with a little vanilla and sugar.  You then take store bought chocolate wafer cookies and make stacks of sandwiched whipped cream and cookies.  You then lay all of the stacks next to each other and mortar them together into a large brick of whipped cream.  Wrap it up and put it in the fridge, and this blob of smothered cookies will magically become a cake in a few hours.

This perfect summer dessert is light and fresh and does not require you to turn on the oven, thus lighting your house on fire from the inescapable heat.  Turning your oven on in summer is a horrible, painful self-destructive thing to do.  Baking anytime during the day, while the sun is still out and hot, is suicide.  You can try to bake in the morning and catch the world before it warms up and leave your kitchen a sauna for the rest of the day.  You could attempt to bake at night, but by the time your house has cooled off enough for it to seem healthfully acceptable to heat it back up again, you will barely be able to stay awake through the clanking of the mixer, and it is highly unlikely that the timer will be able to penetrate your slumbering.  I'm mildly disappointed that my house does not have air conditioning thus making it okay to bake in summer, can you tell?

Anyway, the cookies become soggy and mesh with the whipped cream, creating a perfect striped slice of chocolatey sweetness.  So, once upon a few days ago I decided to make one.  It was a sloppy mess, trying to stack them.  Very finger-licking fun.  However, my whipped cream was behaving a little funny, it was a little runny and strange.  Before I frosted the outside of the stacks into a log, I decided to rewhip the whipped cream.  It was then that I realized what was wrong; It was over-whipped, not under whipped.  It began to clump and cling to the paddle of the mixer while the other half of it became a milky puddle in the bottom of the bowl.  I had to leave my refrigerator cake naked, but in return I got butter.  It was a fun surprise.  I put the cake in the fridge confident and right in knowing that it would still taste just as fantastic.

I was given this fantastic accidental butter, but it was not enough.  I added some sea salt and honey and then pulled out my secret weapon.  I have of late, but wherefore I know not, acquired some lavender sugar.  For the past year I have been trying to experiment with it in recipes, but with little success.  From lemonade to profiteroles, nothing has quite given this new and exciting ingredient any chance to highlight it's unique flavor, until now.

Honey lavender butter.  It is delicious.  A milder butter flavor than anything you could buy in the store, but the salt, lavender, and honey give it a perfect balance of flavors that are delicious on bread and toast (which are different?).  It has gone on top of so many biscuits, cookies, and banana bread that I'm becoming mildly distressed as my store of it is rapidly depleting from my fridge.

Move-In Soon

Today is officially the two week mark until move in.  I have a "preparing to survive the apocalypse" worthy stock pile of things to take.  Towels, bed sheets, trash cans, lamps, shower caddies, coat hangers, extension cords, and a bunch of other stuff I can't remember.   And that is only the stuff I've needed to acquire for college.  I have yet to pack any of my clothes, shower stuff, pens and pencils, and random desk knick-knacks.

I've received far too many sad looks from my parent's of recently, but it's been fun getting to point out to them that they'll soon be empty nesters (with me being the youngest).  I've been chatting a lot with one of my three roommates and it seems as though we have all of our group stuff, but there's also a bunch of things that you just to have to say "we'll see when we get there" because having four people in one normal sized dorm room makes it difficult to know how much space we'll have for things like drawers.

All of this has been very surreal.  It's a major life change for me, and as it gets closer and closer it seems like less and less of a reality.  I'm very excited and a pinch nervous, but for now all I can do is gather my stuff together.

Strawberry Heaven

I've had two giant things of strawberries sitting in my fridge ever since I had a barbecue/breakfast get together with some of my friends.  The two trays were at least two pounds, probably more, I don't remember and filled with average, perhaps a little overripe strawberries.  They had pock marks and some were smooshed up against the plastic in a goopy mess.  The bottoms were puckered with multiple seeds and were pale.  I finished off the last of them a day ago, blending them into a smoothie to hide the mushiness.

Given that, you can imagine my excitement when I came home yesterday to discover a gift from the strawberry gods sitting in my fridge.  It is a small pound of the most beautiful strawberries I have ever seen.  Each one is flawless and the most sumptuous shade of cardinal red.  They are not ginormously oversized, but petite and perfect for popping in your mouth.  They're shiny and begging to be photographed for a food magazine.  As Old Joe said in the movie Waitress they're "the way strawberry was always supposed to taste, but never knew how."  They're so fresh and ripe and sweet but tangy.  Absolutely heavenly.  Without a doubt, they will be gone by tomorrow, if not today.

Pudding

Pudding is awesome.  By far one of the most awesome foods of all time.  The cold ooziness is the perfect consistency for eating, slurping, fake chewing, and attempting to make a mushy, chocolatey film to stretch from lip to lip.

I have recently discovered that I do not get bouts of pudding cravings, as is the case with most foods and most people I assume.  But rather, I am in a constant state of pudding craving that I am simply more aware of in times of weakness or boredom.  As such, I often realize my craving at prime munchie time, half an hour before I want to go to bed.  I always find making pudding very therapeutic.  The constant stirring and thickness.  The lazy, boiling chocolate bubbles that are begging me to turn into a tiny dinosaur so I can stick, sink, and drown in their gooey goodness.

There is a minor flaw at starting to make pudding half an hour before you want to go to bed.  Pudding takes longer to make than you would originally suspect.  AND eating chocolate pudding warm is not entirely appealing, so you must wait for the pudding to set first.  Unfortunately, as your spooning the pudding into whatever container you will refrigerate it in, it will be impossible to resist and you will end up licking every ooze of the burning hot, tar-like (but much better tasting) substance.  Though it might burn your tongue, there is nothing like the hot fresh made pudding.  Still, it is impossible to beat the cold, skinned, properly set pudding.

So, anyway.  If you have no shame, no inhibitions, and no sense of what the word "normal" means, I strongly recommend attempting to eat pudding through a straw. It is a ridiculous amount of fun, super-suction power, and funny noises.  There should be a contest to see who can eat a portion of pudding through a straw fastest.  It would be about a two hour competition.  It's so amusing.

The Beat of the Eggs

This is a poem I wrote sophomore year in a creative writing class I took with the same super awesome English teacher as the AP  English classes I took in my last two years of high school.  We're buds. Anyway, the assignment was to pace the poem with it's context.  Hopefully, you'll get that just from reading it.  This poem was graded as "a super-duper A" and is still one of the creative writing works I am most proud of.

Cold

Fridge door

Cold

Awkward sphere

Carefully,

Carefully,

Tapping it on the counter.

Impatience

Banging it on the counter with a force that could have smashed it to pieces

Tugging to get two separate halves

No shell bits yet

Separate the sun from it's watery horizon

Dripping, 

Slowly,

Oozing,

Shifting the yoke from shell to shell

Then,

Waiting,

Waiting for the drip,

Find the mixer

Feel the power in your hand

A momentary thought of it's true potential

Rushed through my head

Plug it in

Set to four speed

Patience,

Patience.

Rotating the blue bowl,

Cautiously moving the mixer to get all the whites,

As the mixer beats

Whips

Whirls

Fluffs the whites into a cloud

Bumble, Buzz, and Bee Inspired

This was, or I guess still is, my college essay.  Enjoy!

            It was the first official Wednesday of fall, and it felt it.  Bundled up in a gray drama sweatshirt reading “Act Justly,” I closed the red door behind me and shuffled down the eroding brick stairs covered in mutilated acorn husks from the hungry squirrels’ gluttonous debauchery.  I paused halfway down to admire the handiwork of one of my favorite natural artists, an elegant spider displaying her expansive, dewy  web polka dotted and heavy with gutless mummified corpses, twenty-seven unfortunate victims in all.  Preparing to continue my descent, I was stopped again by a peculiar sound, the buzzing vibration of two candy wrapper wings fluttering against each other.  Turning, I encountered a fat and juicy, humming bumblebee, his thighs thick with yellow pollen like a very unflattering pair of leggings from our miraculously reblooming azalea bush.  I watched along, fascinated, as he bumbled on his way, hovering over each flower to find one untouched and going in for the landing, flailing his wings to steady himself as he scraped out the amber staple and unwillingly made the silence-shattering buzz.   He left the bush, hovered in front of my face, traced a doughnut around my curly head, and flew off to pay his golden taxes to his tyrannical queen; only after his departure did I notice the few other bees busily and noiselessly at work.

            Noticing their lack of buzz, I observed them closely and realized they also lacked bumble: they would land, gracefully and perfectly, on each flower, fold their wings behind their backs, and crawl across the petals, extracting the pollen carefully.  My attention was recaptured by a familiar hum, and I quickly sought out the flower my fuzzy friend had restarted his pollen picking on.  This time I studied him vigilantly for what seemed like an hour, though it couldn’t have been more than half a minute.  Having found a suitable source, he landed on the delicate wiry stamen and began beating his glossy wings furiously, fumbling to gather the pollen.  Once, twice, three times he fell out of the pinkish purple flowers, and three times he fell half a foot, making me flinch and gasp, before he painstakingly restarted his flying and returned to his post.  As he clung to the petal to rest his weary wings, I noticed a chunk of gossamer missing from his left wing.
            I was shamed by that bumblebee.  He worked hard, despite his shortcomings, to meet the standards of his fellow workers.  I have the potential to excel in all I do, and yet I often merely get by, procrastinating and slacking in any dull or difficult subjects.  I have challenged myself in classes I enjoy and subjects that come easily to me, but I usually brush off topics I find uninteresting as unimportant.  Yet here was this maimed bumblebee, scrounging for food for his family as best he could, which was still mediocre.
            And suddenly, a new layer of insight and understanding was revealed.  I was no longer a squished moth on the windshield of this bee’s life, but a passenger beside him.    This humble bee and I shared a love of creating and living food.  My academic successes no longer mattered, for I know how to cook, an art that seems to be dying out in this age of microwavable delectables.  What will knowing the laws of sine and cosine, the phases of mitosis, and the different mounds of the Mound Builders do for me if I am unable to feed myself?  How can a doctor measure her worth if she goes home to feed her children Chef Boyardee every night?  Isn’t it soul-crushing when people know of nothing better than Poptarts, Campbells canned soup, and Betty Crocker brownies from a box?  Is quality and flavor so far gone that we must stoop to these minimal levels of taste bud stimulation?  When will the future come, when we eat little vitamin-like tablets for nutrition and get on with our lives?  Or does the future hold in store beauty, art, and flavors unexplored and unimagined, waiting in some obscure cave in the recesses of genius?
            Mine does.