biscuit spit.

It was a Saturday morning, and I had decided to take on biscuits. There are many foods which I wish to someday conquer, foods which can be acquired in a almost-completed state at the grocery store. I want to prove to the world that I can do it better than the expensive, yet convenient packaged goods. I had already defeated frozen pizza and fries, but now it was time for biscuits. Also, I'm dating a nice Southern boy, and I think biscuit-making abilities might be a prerequisite for marriage.

For about the fiftieth time since I started cooking, I discovered that making something from scratch is not as difficult as the convenience food companies would have you believe. I mixed the ingredients, used a canister lid to cut the biscuits, and stuck them in the oven. When they came out ten minutes later, they were not as fluffy looking as I might have liked, but they were mine. I took a bite.

Then spit it out.

Josh stared at me. This was the first time he'd ever seen me spit out food, and perhaps he was determining whether our relationship was worth the risk of ever seeing it again. Maybe I should have considered my audience more carefully before shooting a half-eaten biscuit bite from my mouth to my hand, but the biscuit was just plain bad. To his credit, he also tore off a small bite and put it in his mouth. He managed to swallow it, but he was raised better than I was.

I started wondering where I had gone wrong. There's no way the recipe, which came highly recommended, was meant to turn out like that. Those things tasted like pure baking soda. I mean, that sorta made sense, because I had put a lot of baking soda in. It was in the recipe! See, right there, baking...powder. Well, there's the problem.

"Oh, I used the wrong ingredient," I explained to Josh as he rooted around in the fridge for something to get the bad biscuit taste out of his mouth. Suddenly, he swooped upon me, taking me in his arms, rubbing my back and kissing my cheek, murmuring, "Oh, it's okay, s'okay." I enjoy a good swooping hug as much as anyone, but this one was unexpected. Had I been four years old with a freshly-scraped knee, I might have understood.

I thought back to myself six months ago, trying to make salmon and screwing it up, crying in the kitchen because I'd burned myself and the glaze was more like hard candy. Cooking stressed me out, and the slightest mishap induced sobs. However, the more I cook, the more I realize that sometimes things work and sometimes they don't. Of course, Josh remembered me emerging from the kitchen with red, wet cheeks and red, burned arms and was trying to reassure me. He really is very sweet sometimes.

"Honey, I'm fine. I can make another batch, it only takes like twenty minutes." So I did. And they were good. I win.

My standard biscuit recipe. I could probably make better biscuits if I got up at 5 AM like those old women in the Hardees commercials, but you can get up at noon and make these.