Making Time for Biscuit Love

There hasn't been a heck of a lot of home improvement going on around here, or garden work. By extension, that means there hasn't been a lot of writing going on around here either-- that stuff the professionals refer to as "high-quality, original content."

It's been one of those weeks. And it's not over yet. 

I have a job that can have crazy hours, which can mean long hours or irregular hours or both. Combine that with single parenting four boys, and well, sometimes I get a little sideways with the world. Too much to do, not enough time to do it in, and not enough money to pay for either.

I get overwhelmed. Realizing that a box of cereal would need to be 238 ounces in order to survive a week in our household overwhelmed. Several hundred dollars worth of unplanned car repair (surprise!) overwhelmed.

It's the kind of overwhelmed that finds you collapsed on the sofa at 11:55 p.m., still in your office duds, and eating buttercream frosting with a spoon straight out of the retail container.

It's at that point I feel the urge to start overcompensating. What do I do when I've got TOO much to do?

How about home made yogurt?

I know. I'm nuts. At the point most women would just hunker down and start opening up soup cans and peanut butter jars out of a healthy survival instinct, I've got to cram some home cooking in there somewhere. Right in the middle of grocery shopping at lunch hour, working evenings, and folding laundry at the breakfast table, I sometimes have to drop all the urgency and go make something from scratch.

The other night, we had chicken tenderloins from a freezer bag and some fruit salad I threw together. But I got out the flour and baking powder and made the biscuits. 

Have you ever made biscuits? It's just a few simple ingredients, a few love pats to a tender pastry, and pop them right in an extra hot oven (thus the phrase "hot as a biscuit"). My children are a bunch of little Yankees and like them with jam or honey. Mr. Man Friend likes it when I make him sausage gravy on biscuits for breakfast. I like them with slightly indecent amounts of butter.

They DO take a little more time than breaking open a tube of biscuits from the grocery store refrigerator case. And if a tube of biscuits is the only kind you've ever had, I feel more than sorry for you. It's an injustice to your person. Really.

Years ago, Noah, my 12-year-old, helped me coin the family phrase "biscuit love." We decided that means you love someone just crazy enough to make them homemade biscuits any old time they ask. You don't feel that way about just anybody. Only special somebodies. Somebodies who understand just how fleeting and wonderful and loving a hot biscuit is.

I think that's where it is coming from. The biscuit love. My cooking sprees aren't really guilt or self reproach or the need to compensate for perceived shortcomings. Lord knows it isn't exactly practical, but love rarely is anyway. Biscuit love is probably even a little more wild-eyed and wayward. Biscuit love is brash enough to claim the priority of my boys' hearts over the chaos, and shows I care for them with butter and honey on top.

That's a recipe my family can make time for.