In Search of the Perfect Biscuit

It’s really Grover’s fault that I’ve been making biscuits, in search of perfection. I had brought triple-ginger gingerbread to work to share one day, which inspired spicy applesauce muffins...  chocolate-chip peanut butter cookies…and brownies, the kind that don’t come out of a box and melt in your mouth. I saved Grover a brownie and told him I was sorry that his was the smallest one in the batch. Grover responded by asking what I was bringing in tomorrow (yes he is that annoying) and then he waxed poetic over biscuits, hot from the oven, smoking from steam and eaten with a chunk of butter, washed down with honey or homemade jam (told you he is annoying). I suddenly had that hot biscuits with butter taste in my mouth, too, which was why I researched biscuits, all kinds from baking power to sourdoughs and ended by fermenting my own starter and baking many batches of sourdough biscuits. Hot from the oven, smoking and steaming, they are delicious, flaky, tender, blessed with butter and anointed with honey.

Using google, I researched sourdough starters and yeast, leavening methods, history of the sourdough method, Lactobacillus culture, and somehow ended up reading about the hay maze in Bozeman, Montana. Suddenly I understood why breadmaking is intimidating to some. Sourdough is traditionally made using a portion of sourdough saved from a prior batch. (How do you get started if you need a prior batch?) The prior batch is called mother dough, or chef, or seed sour. What? Three words for the same thing? I liked the info at joejaworski.com/bread, everything seemed so straightforward. But again, I became overwhelmed with all the info. Ultimately I used unbleached flour, tap water (left overnight, uncovered, in a bowl), dunked briefly rinsed local grapes in it to get the local microorganisms and waited. It worked and I was pleased but mildly shocked. I used this starter many times. The biscuits have a distinct flavor which I now know is the result of the lactic acid produced by the lactobacilli. The biscuits are also delicious – so incredibly good that I suddenly have an urge to bake them again.

In August, of all months, I suddenly had a taste for biscuits again, but wanted to try a different flavor, which led to experiments with sweet potato recipes although I prefer yams. The first batch was good, but I wanted to make it better, and my daughter said I should make it sweeter and spicier. This is the recipe:

Sift together 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder and ¼ teaspoon salt. Cut ½ cup butter into the flour mixture, using a fork or a pastry cutter. Meanwhile, you have microwaved or baked two small garnet yams, peeled and mashed them in a separate bowl, added 2 tablespoons each of molasses and brown sugar, ½ teaspoon cinnamon, and ¼ each of grated fresh nutmeg and mace or cloves. You should have about one and a half cups of gooey spicy yam glop. Add it to the dry mixture, then add up to 6 tablespoons of milk. Blend the mixtures together with as few strokes as possible, turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and roll it out ½ inch thick. Use a round biscuit cutter, or make large squares. Oven 400 degrees, ungreased cookie sheet, bake about 10 minutes.

The little biscuit sandwiches in the picture are from the first batch, spread with horseradish stoneground mustard and sliced chicken basil sausages. Notice how brown the biscuits are because of the addition of the yams. I also made tomato sandwiches with these biscuits.

Missing New England, Missing Vacation

I don't do recipes, I really don't, except when there's leavening involved, and I always follow the oven temp and baking times. Outside of that, whenever I try to follow a recipe (and I really do try) somewhere my version takes flight and becomes its own version. I truly first realized this several years ago when my daughter asked me for my recipe for jambalaya, and I admitted that I didn't have a recipe.Long ago, I had read someone else's recipe, but I started making jambalaya and I kept making it without measuring anything. So, I told Sasha that I could tell her how I make it, and if she could remember watching me make it, she could do it, too. I'll have to ask her how that worked out for her....

Tonight I've been back from Maine for ten days now, and have been longing for lobster chowder, so I made some except I had no lobster. ps it was all yummy good
I started with 2 tablespoons of olive oil and 2 tablespoons of butter, heated and melted, to which I added 2 small onions, chopped (or 1 large) and 3-4 stalks of celery over medium heat. Turned the heat down to low while I diced 2 medium potatoes and let them cook, stirring constantly as the potatoes could make the whole thing stick-and-burn. After 5 minutes I added about 4 ladles of (homemade) chicken stock that just happened to have been on the back burner, and let it simmer a little while. Next, I sliced the kernels off an ear of corn, and when the mixture was boiling again, added more stock, enough to almost cover the ingredients. I ground in fresh pepper, covered the pot and left it alone for about ten minutes. The last ingredient was one half pound of surimi, crab-flavored fish. (I'd wanted to use lobster, but oh well) I stirred it, covered it and left it alone for another ten minutes. It had thickened, was quite hot and delicious. I forced myself to eat seconds, sadly enough. 

Now, if I'd had lobster to use, and had added 1/2 cup cream, the character of the chowder would have been very different. Or, if I'd added 4 strips of bacon and two more ears of corn, along with the cream, but subtract the surimi, I'd have had corn chowder - another favorite.
Please pass the crackers.

Travels with the Wi-Fi Bandit October 2010

Last year I went foliage-gazing in NH and Maine and Im going again this year, leaving this Saturday. Here is one of the emails I wrote from the road, excerpted:
Dear Friends, Relations and Those Who Prefer Door #3......
Virgin Airlines seats are so closely packed that you have to get off the plane to change your mind...my forehead was almost pressing against the back of the chair in front of me. My neighbors on either side, however, were not nearly as close due to the remote controls stored in the arm rests for the screen on the back of the chair in front of you. Yeah, that's right, the one my forehead was pressing against. You can also play video games on them - one round of Mah Jong was all it took for me to go cross-eyed. 

The FAA has passed a new law against consumible foodstuffs allowed on planes - there aren't any. If I hadn't brought a tomato sandwich I would have starved on that five hour flight, sandwiched as I was between two Sox fans. Im hoping to hear a Brahmin accent. My linguistics professor said Boston Brahmin is a dialect which has been studied, noted, dissected, analyzed und so wieder... I've heard none of the above but much of the linguistic variety aspired to by the cast of "The Perfect Storm" while I'm surrounded by men swilling ginger ale. Attention Samuel Adams: your Boston Lager isn't being lagered on this plane! !

I was expecting total madness from Logan but it was much cleaner and calmer than I had expected. I made my way to the luggage claim area and retrieved my suitcase (singular) then began looking around for the Concord Trailways bus to take me to Portland which was when I realized that the Entire Airport I had walked around was really only a teeny-tiny corner. Oh my goodness. I bucked up my courage and hoped the bus could find me amidst Loganmetropolis. (Where the hell am I????)  and the blue-white striped monster drove me to Portland and showed me a movie on the 2-hour drive about a wholesome African American choir girl who meets a handsome gospel-singing player, joins his troupe and goes on the road with him.

Portland's routes look unfamiliar to somebody who grew up with California freeways, but are similar to Bozeman, Spokane and St. Louis. The air was BRACING when I got off the bus and couldn't find Greg Ford straightaway (where the hell am I???) but he was parked in front whereas the bus parked in the back. Hence the confusion. This was Saturday.

Day Two: Escape from SFO to Boothbay Harbor
Yesterday I arrived in Portland after 10pm with an mild case of excessive g-forces absorbed from flying across the country and an extreme case of sillie-willies. We bought cheap champagne and stayed up late talking and sipping Andre from plastic cups. Who says travel isn't glamorous? Sunday morning before coffee kicked in we set out for Portland Light, located at the old Fort Williams at Cape Elizabeth on Casco Bay. Portland Head Light, or Portland Light, is the beloved lighthouse maintained by the city of Portland.

It's located at Bug Light Park in South Portland (no, Drew, that's not Bud Light but BUG Light). The entemologists among you may take a moment to explain this to the etymologistically challenged. The site was established in 1855, the lighthouse built in 1875 (ahoy Captain Ahab) automated in 1934, discontinued in 1942, relighted in 2002 as a private service. Its original optic was 6th order Fresnel glass (pronounced Freh-NELL) currently its 250mm. The tower is 25 feet, its characteristic is a flashing white every 4 seconds. The parking is free, you hike in and of course I hadda see the fort first (kind of reminded me of Sutter's Fort without the scary mummified figures lurking in the darkened rooms....) There is a wonderful stroll/view, a sidewalk of sorts with a wall, you look out over the ocean/vista and there are rocks, tidepools and far far out in the distance a cruise ship, kind of like a BIg Duck Turd. What's wrong with this picture? You can visualize yourself here amongst the 18th/19th century stage props, baking bread, mending fishnets, running back and forth in the invigorating sea air, then there is that big lump of DT like an excessive jolt of reality, kind of makes you believe in alien abductions..I digress...

There is a gift shop, so small you have to go outside to change your mind. I bought a pack of Maine lupine flower seeds, Greg Ford bought a lighthouse flashlight. The lighthouse tower is humongous, I looked it up and down, trying to mentally calculate how many bushels it could hold were it a silo. The lighthouse is a very bright white, shiny and thick-feeling, like there have been hundreds of layers of white enamel paint applied since 1855. You can't go inside the tower. Im looking forward to Pemaquid, one of the few lighthouses you can go into and climb up inside.

Which pretty much brings us up to date. I flew into Boston today, caught a bus to Portsmouth while Greg Ford crisscrossed his interline self across country. Tomorrow, Kittery (is it an island or a lighthouse? depends on the tide) and Boothbay Harbor, a LOBstah roll from Phil's, a pit stop in Kennebuck, and Lighthouses 101, my 2011 version.

My brother broke the thermometer. Or maybe my mother broke the thermometer. Memory is a funny thing - you think you remember something happening when it happened to somebody else. Or maybe you patched two things together, or maybe something completely different happened, but you don't realize it. I do remember that strange liquid pooling. My mother used the end of the glass tubing to scoop up little bits of glittery silver molten, and pushed them towards each other until they joined. She let me play with it for a few seconds after telling me not to lean over it. In my adulthood, I now have a frame of reference to describe this experience. The T1000 in "Terminator 2" is composed of metal that rejoins like the mercury. There was a scene where John Connor shoved a chunk of metal off the back of their vehicle, it bounced down the road to rejoin the body of the T1000. 

The mercury was viscuous but fluid, it shimmered and fascinated me. After she had put it up out of reach, my mother told me it was poisonous and even breathing in the air around it could harm me. Using the edge of the glass tubing, then a piece of paper, she scraped up all the mercury, gently shaking each bit into the shimmering pool collecting on the saucer. She told me to never use a vacuum or a broom while cleaning up mercury. At her request, I retrieved the powdered sulfur from the shed leftover from dehydrating apricots. Mom sprinkled the sulphur on the floor, then gave me a special job for the afternoon: keeping my brothers out of the kitchen.


I know now that the mercury and sulphur created mercuric sulfide, which Mom used a whisk broom to gather. I don't remember how she disposed of the mercury. I only remember the quicksilver or mercury, named after Mercury, god of speed and mobility. Chemical symbol is Hg, atomic number 80, short for hydr- (water) and argyros (silver). A coin floats in a puddle of mercury due to a combination of buoyant force and surface tension. Mercury's unique electronic configuration is that electrons fill up all the available subshells 1-6. Liquid silver.


Quicksilver is also something that moves or changes very quickly, that's impossible to define, to hold, to contain. What is this blog about? Music, languages, math, food and food science. Travel. Anxiety. Facing your fears. Grief. Friends, loyalty, passion. And an ode to my mother, the artist who became a chemist who became a minister.