The miracle

Gardening is magical. We put seeds in the soil, give them water, and wait for the miracle: plants make food out of air. It never fails to amaze me and fill my heart with gratitude. It’s not just a miracle, it’s THE miracle. Photosynthesis provides the energy for all life on earth except for those weird organisms that grow around the deep-sea vents. As our tender seedlings grow, we watch them carefully, pulling out the weeds that perversely grow more vigorously than the ones we want to eat. If crab grass was good in salads, we’d be all set.

The miracle: a bean seedling

The shooting stars and geraniums have gone to seed. Now penstemon takes the main stage.

Penstemon

Other lesser miracles are all around us as well. The robin under the deck has three chicks. I waited patiently to get a picture of her return to the nest with food.

FEED ME!!!

And later settling down to give the chicks a little warm up. It was cold and damp this weekend.

Is this comfortable for anyone?

Our chicks get bigger every day. I took some pictures on Wednesday. The Big Red Broilers like the perch I put in for them.

Big Red Broilers on the perch

The Black Australorps were getting cute little tail feathers.

Cute little tail feathers

The Whiting True Green chicks have lovely bars on their rings.

Decorative wing feathers

Here are some picture from yesterday. The Broilers are getting dark feathers on their wings. I’m surprised that their down is so light colored when they are supposed to be red when mature. We’ll see.

Dark feathers on the Broilers

I think the meat chickens are growing faster than the layers, but it isn’t so obvious as it was with the Cornish x Rocks. The chicks are also taking on “big girl” postures, standing around with their necks extended.

I think the meat chick is bigger, maybe

I have been terribly disorganized about suppers lately. After working outside all day, I’m sore and tired. I thought it was time to muster some effort on Sunday, so I made biscuits to have with Tundra Surprise beef stem (i.e., beef stew that had been languishing forgotten in the freezer for months). A dear friend included some cooking magazines in her retirement gift bag for me. One of them was all about Southern breakfasts. I read it cover-to-cover, as I do all cooking magazines, and dog-eared the page with Our Favorite Biscuits. If it is the favorite of Southern cooks, it’s got to be good, am I right? They live on biscuits down there.

Part of the appeal of the recipe was that it used self-rising flour. I needed said flour for a cookie recipe I tried recently and discovered that It was surprisingly hard to find here up north. I had to buy a 5-pound bag, of which I had used about a cup. If these biscuits were good, I had an opportunity to use up the flour. (The cookies were okay, but I’m not sure I’ll make them again.)

I did the mise en place in the morning while I was fresh. The biscuit recipe began with grating one stick of frozen butter on a box grater. I’d seen this technique on TV and was intrigued. I am intrigued no more. God, what a mess. I did it over a cutting board. The butter thawed instantly on impact, and there you are. I scraped the butter off the cutting board as best I could without getting it balled up too much. I tossed it with 2.5 cups of all-purpose flour and put it in the refrigerator. It was only supposed to be in there for 10 minutes, but I figured all day wouldn’t make any difference.

Before supper, I mixed in one cup of buttermilk. “The dough will be sticky.” Understatement of the year. It was impossible. And I was supposed to roll it out “on a lightly floured surface” and fold it in half five times to layer the butter. It seemed that no amount of flour would keep it from sticking to the counter and the rolling pin. I did what I could with my bench scraper and ended up patting it flat with my (well-floured) hands. I tried to cut out the biscuits but could not get them free of a) the counter or b) the biscuit cutter. They weren’t awfully round when I put them on the parchment paper.

They didn’t rise much either. Here they are, looking more like cookies than biscuits.

Failed, and yet successful biscuits

Note: Terry loved the moistness of them, declared they were “better than Popeye’s”, and ate four. So there you go.