Will and Way

Saturday is Mexican Restaurant Day. I don’t cook lunch, and we dine in the late afternoon, so sometimes I like to cook breakfast. Today I was willing to make (and clean up after) biscuits. I got the flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt out of the pantry. I took down my big blue bowl from its shelf. I turned the dial on the oven…click, click, click, click, oh yeah, I remember, something’s crinked with the pilot ignition on my twenty-year-old gas stove, click, click, click. No oven.

We do have McDonald’s and Burger King, but sometimes Mr. K gets massive indigestion if he eats their biscuits…we suspect a confluence of his allergy to anything with a brain stem and lard. Fast food was out, but I still wanted biscuits, so:

I stacked two of those little pan grates (you know, the ones over the gas stove eyes that pans sit on…do they have a name?) over a stove eye and greased an iron skillet. I made my biscuits thinking this could be one of those episodes that resulted in no food, a messy kitchen, and other horrors I had not imagined or I would not have even started this process…in other words, a genuine learning experience. But I WANTED BISCUITS. Actually, a biscuit, but you can never make just one.

I spent the next forty-five minutes stacking and unstacking skillets (I used a lid on the biscuit skillet) on the stacked grates. Cooking in the oven takes about 20 minutes. Eventually, voila, hot, fluffy biscuits. Only the center one had a burned bottom, and that was because I had gotten impatient and unstacked when I should have left stacked.

Biscuits, with a soysage and an egg, and we had happy Saturday breakfast.

“A cooking genius,” Mr. K crowed.

Sometimes what looks like genius to others is just a desire for something and the willingness to risk making a big fat mess in order to get it.