Biscuit bodhisattva

Anybody who has known me for somewhat longer than 5 minutes knows that I like to cook. I have historically gone in for the strange and oriental pursuits and like to boast that I'm fairly good at it (I like to boast about anything I think I can get away with). It's been more than 15 years since the wife got me that hand hammered wok from the 30 minute infomercial we saw on TV and I'm still spending a large number of Sundays in the kitchen whipping up stir fry and dumplings for the family and occasional stray teenager. Any kid that shows up at my house becomes mine while they are here (usually with my son) and they will always be fed. I get a big kick out of sitting them down at the table and watching them eat. (I like to use them as guinea pigs to try out new things too). We once had a door-to-door salesman show up just as we were sitting down to eat a big Chinese feast. He was young and looked really hungry so I made him sit and eat with us and wouldn't talk business until we were all done. I didn't buy anything from him but he walked away with a full belly. So the other day it was getting close to suppertime and I was wondering what to fix. The idea of having supper at a cheap restaurant was looking good since I'm on vacation and there wasn't anyone here but me and the oldest son, Marsh. As I stood there in my pantry, waffling over the rather bleak selection of supper choices, in walks the other son and one of his friends. I had been hoping to catch him here for a few minutes since I always subcontract out all of my Christmas present wrapping to him and I had fixed his car this morning; so he owed me large, as far as I was concerned. I hit him up about the gifts I needed wrapped and he countered with the excuse that he couldn't because he had a friend over. Not to be outwitted, I immediately volunteered her as well and they were both conscripted into service as gift wrappers. There wasn't a press gang in the King's Navy that could have put those two to work quicker than me. She thought it was fun since she liked to wrap gifts anyway. I thought it was fun too since I wasn't going to have to do it. I like to buy gifts but I'll leave the wrapping for others. I loaded them up with all of my things and just for good measure I also gave them what the wife had left to wrap as well. "Being one of my kids" occasionally is a double edged sword in that you will do some chores.

My belly reminded me that I still hadn't solved the food problem yet and I quickly realized that I wasn't going to be able to bail out and eat somewhere else. I thought about take-out pizza but remembered that I was facing the jaws of 3 hungry kids plus myself and my wallet was already groaning from Christmas spending. No problem, I'll whip up a batch of spaghetti. Cheap, quick, easy. Big problem: no noodles. I swear I had two big boxes of spaghetti noodles and now they're gone. I looked around for other options and started to get a little nervous. Jeez, I needed to go grocery shopping. We were out of everything. All that was left was the chicken in the refrigerator that had been seasoned for the next day's supper. I was going to make Southern style pan-fried chicken. It was going to be a special meal for the wife. You see, all these years that I spent studying the mysteries of Chinese cooking had left a big void in my ability to cook traditional Southern foods. Recently I had been practicing but the results were not too good. I was hitting the biscuits pretty hard and had been interrogating the older women at work for their secrets to biscuit Nirvana. I would bake up a batch, try them, scrutinize them, then back to the drawing board for more questions and answers. I watched Alton Brown on the food network. I studied recipes for hours on the internet. I discussed protein content in the flour on biscuit forums. Some said it was the type of flour, others mentioned shortening instead of butter, perhaps it was my kneading technique. My boss at work even floored me with the statement that he just bought premade biscuits in the frozen food isle and baked those! Oh, the inhumanity of it all! Imagine it if you will, simply popping a few of those floured hockey pucks into the oven and calling them biscuits! I believe that is still a misdemeanor in some formerly Confederate states. I just can't go on about it. I summed up all of my choices and decided that the best thing to do, considering the circumstances, was to cook tomorrow's feast tonight. The wife would understand. She knows kids too and wouldn't want to see any of them starve to death if they missed one supper. (She also knew about my biscuits). So there it was laid out in front of me. I was going to go all-out, hog wild, and fix a traditional Southern supper. Pan-fried chicken, made from scratch biscuits, mac and cheese, and corn. Only logistical obstacle was that I needed to get that stuff cracking right now. I set to work like a wild man, using my years of experience as an Industrial Engineer performing stop watch time studies to prep and cook everything as efficiently as possible and with the least amount of effort.

You're most likely wondering why I didn't make mention of gravy, that most puritanical object of Southern affection. They say it flows in the veins of all the sons and daughters of the Confederacy. I must admit that gravy is my Achilles heel. I just don't get it. When I make my confession about this shortcoming, I usually get grins and suggestions. "Oh it's so easy". "All you gotta do is..." I listen with a sheepish grin and think back to the day that 3 foot high flames were blazing out of the frying pan the last time I attempted gravy. My insurance agent has written a clause in my homeowner's policy that I am not to be making any gravy in that house or my fire insurance is cancelled.

I think I had it all on the table in about 35 minutes. As I was racing around trying to get it all coordinated and ready, I nearly forgot about the biscuits and pulled them out just in time. Brown but not burned, I was happy. The kids didn't say much, they were too busy stuffing themselves. But I did hear one comment: "These biscuits are so good, just like my Grandma makes". There you have it, the ultimate compliment, the purple heart of cooking, an Oscar: "just like Grandma's".

Tea for one

Tea for one

Tea is the second most popular drink in the world (water is first). Nothing to it; simply drop a few tea leaves into a pot, add hot water and enjoy. Or so it would seem. Actually, tea is sort of a Zen-like endeavour that can best be described as a journey with no end. The proper marriage of two simple ingredients has endless variations. Water is the first ingredient and thankfully the only variation is the temperature. The freaks will argue that the water must come from a running stream and cannot be bottled or (God fobid) come from a tap. I believe the most over-the-top example of water collection is the tea water that was gathered for an empress in China from the dew of plum blossoms in the mountains every morning (it's true). For the moment, I'll just get my water out of the tap, thank you very much. I can't taste the chlorine in it thanks to my filter. Maybe not good enough for the Empress of China but good enough for me. Tea water temp. can (and should) vary from boiled to just slightly warmer than tepid. It all depends on the next ingredient, the tea itself. The same tea will taste vastly different depending on the temperature of the water it is steeped in. I opened a package of "Sencha", a Japanese green tea and became a little worried when I saw it. The leaves were tiny. It smelled different that the other teas I had been drinking. When I tried it, I hated it. Tasted awful. Besides being tenacious, I am pretty cheap, so I wasn't about to throw it away or give up on it. Pretty good combination for a tea drinker. So I started experimenting with this stuff. The first thing I did was to heat the water less. In order to heat water anything less than boiling requires careful observation of the water as it heats in the kettle. I think that some kettles act different than others. I've got a cast iron kettle and it acts differently than my old tin one. Anyway; I had read in "The Tao of Tea", one of the great Tea classics, that tea water was to be heated to various degrees that were described by the size of the bubbles in the kettle. "When the bubbles are the size of shrimps eyes" is the temp. for white teas. "Bubbles the size of crab's eyes" is the setting for green teas. I think that "bubbles the size of fish eyes' is the setting for oolong and black teas but since I don't drink much of these, I don't pay attention to that one. Anybody out there ever seen a shrimp's eye? Or a crab's eye for that matter? Not lately, I'm sure. Well, it's a fun thing for me to tell others about anyway. Gives the whole experience a little bit of mystery to it. So, as I watched my water in the kettle for a crab's eye sighting, I noticed that the size of the bubbles does indeed change depending on the water temperature. Oh, I could get all technological on it and stick a digital thermometer in the water to indicate the ideal temperature but sometimes I prefer the old ways. Besides, who wants to stand there with a probe in their hand when all they have to do is look for the crab's eyes right? I started to pull the kettle off the stove earlier and earlier, noticing the behaviour of the bubbles and the water itself until I got the hang of this fish eye stuff. There is one other sign, which is most difficult and elusive to look for and that is "at the first breath of the water", meaning when you see just a faint wisp of steam from the pot. I don't usually catch that one. I believe it has more to do with the ambient temperature in the room anyway. So, as I progressed to catching crab's eyes, to shrimp's eyes, I noticed that the tea was starting to taste a little better. Tea should feel "silky" on your tongue. You will know what I mean if you get the temperature low enough. When everything comes together, the taste difference is dramatic. I've noticed that some teas are actually sweet, others have a wonderful woody taste, and others simply are hard to describe in words but they do taste good. It's possible to compare tea tasting in the same light as wine tasting. I had a tea in one of Sanfrancisco's Chinatown tea shops that was so good it didn't even taste like tea. It was fantastic. It was also $700/lb. yikes.

So I've determined that water temperature plays a big part in the preparation of tea. I think that this is of primary importance, the other variables are of lesser concern but merit discussion anyway. The amount of tea placed in the pot also determines taste but this runs in conjunction with the steeping time. Add too much tea and you better decrease the steeping time. Too little and let it sit longer. It's all about balance. I believe that the taste of the tea will be different depending on how much is in the pot. Take two pots of tea, side by side, one with too much tea and the other with not quite so much. Let them both steep, one for a little while longer than the other (the one with the lesser amount of tea in it) and they won't taste at all the same. I prefer to fix a pot of tea with the intention of only using the leaves once. Some like to throw the leaves in there and pour the water over them mulitple times, letting the tea steep longer after each pour.

So what's left? Why, the tea of course! Every tea has it's own method of preparation. The water temp/steeping time/quantity of tea leaves is different for each one. It took me nearly the entire jar of that Japanese Sencha tea to figure out how to correctly make it (at least to where I liked the taste). I went from hating it at the beginning, to loving it in the end. It really was wonderful stuff and taught me tea preparation. I need to dig around in my tea stash and see if there's another bag of that stuff hidden in there.