The Urban Farmer's Almanac

My mom used to make biscuits for breakfast all the time, and we’d have them with butter (let’s be honest, it was margarine) and jam or honey. Then I went off to college and the one thing I still miss from the Fairhaven dining hall is their biscuits and gravy, which I think were usually available on the weekends. Despite these fond memories, I rarely make biscuits these days.

Enter the New York Times Magazine a couple weeks ago. Like most weeks, one of the first things I read on Sunday morning is the recipe in the magazine, and it happened to be about biscuits, so I cut it out and pinned it to the fridge, which in the past has meant that Alicia will have to recycle it when I’ve forgotten about it in about 6 months.

But I woke up (or rather, was woken up by a baby) early today, and after finishing the last 25 pages of the book I was reading, I was ready to face the day, starting with a fresh batch of biscuits. You can get the recipe here, and the only change I made to the easy recipe was I did all the sifting and mixing in the food processor, instead of getting a bowl dirty too. The sausage gravy looks awesome as well (and the recipe features the instructions to cook “until its flavors are gathered close”, which is awfully poetic for a truck-stop specialty.) But I think the full biscuits and gravy assault on my arteries is best attempted on a weekend.

Breakfast today was equal parts nostalgia and the New York Times, a perfect description of most of the things I love, and it makes me laugh at the person I try so hard to be.

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Putting radishes in the salad and trying to get the camera to capture the electric pink; close but not quite.

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Robbie and I were out picking raspberries today and he said, “These plants are dead, dad,” referring to the potato buckets we planted earlier this year. He was right. What was lush green leaves a month or two ago had faded to a couple yellowed branches. The dirt looked pretty dry, too. Things on the side of the house don’t get watered much.

I decided to see how the potatoes did this year. The design of the planter makes it really easy to harvest – since they’re sections of a garbage can, you just pull the container up and sift through the dirt pile for treasures. It’s pretty amazing that I was able to plant some mushy, terrifying looking potatoes from the drawer and get these as a result. The harvest was relatively modest but it will be fun to fry up some potatoes for dinner tonight.

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There have been a couple ingredients that have been languishing around here, causing me all kinds of guilt. One was a bowl of porcini mushrooms (King Boletes) that we foraged out near Leavenworth when we went camping a week or two ago. I owe you a post about those, by the way. The other was bok choi that’s been ready for at least a month in the garden, and was starting to flower.

Finally today, we woke up to a bit of rain after a string of 8o° days, and inspiration hit. I decided to make some mushroom and bok choi miso soup with rice noodles for lunch. It hit the spot, used some food up, and the kids even ate it.

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Awhile back on this blog we wrote about the revolution that was the book Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day .  It was a great change of technique that really improved our bread making.  However I still ended up buying or making a lot of our sandwich bread because I prefer whole wheat bread – it just makes me feel like a better mom.  Enter Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes a Day.  A new (ish- I am little late to the table with this one) book by the same authors that includes 100% whole wheat, sandwich bread and many enriched breads.  I’ve checked it out from the library twice and am now thinking I will just buy the darn book so I can always have it around.  It makes a really nice sandwich bread and I am anxious to try some of the other recipes in the book.

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