Morning Biscuits
08-16-2012
I have never been one to observe the tradition that certain foods must only be eaten at certain times of the day. During the summer the heat drains your appetite for lunch and since I don’t eat breakfast, at night I get hungry. One night while surveying the refrigerator I spy a can of biscuits in the back bought quite a while ago. Closer inspection reveals that it is only 2 or 3 months past the expiration date. As my mom would say:
“Those need to be eaten up”. Since the date has more to do with the food quality than safety, I don’t like to throw out food. My wife has nicknamed me the “human garbage disposal”. Biscuits would be good with strawberry preserves. I pop them open and they smell fine so into the toaster oven they go. Wait. Hmm, need something to go with them and I have time. Out comes the skillet, in goes a blob of butter and 4 eggs. Scramble those suckers and they’ll be done by the time the biscuits are done. The eggs are wonderful and onto the plate they go. Check the biscuits; not done yet. Wait.
All I need is some sausage and I can have “breakfast for supper!” Out comes a 12 inch link of breakfast sausage, sliced and into the skillet. This is gonna be good.
Sausage onto the plate; check biscuits. They are brown on top but they didn’t rise. They’re still the same height that they came out of the can. Hmm, that must be because they’re a little old. Not a problem, some butter and plenty of strawberry preserves will make even an old shoe fit to eat. (close to the consistency of these biscuits too). Cover these with a big dose of preserves and I have a plate full of SUPPER! Just need something to wash it all down; ice cold beer (it is 8 PM. after all). Great meal.
My wife and I, both middle-aged, work and have a set morning routine. She gets up, turns on The Weather Channel, and goes to check her Farmville and Facebook in the dining room. This is the 30 minutes that it takes for me to “break the plane” into consciousness. I have always envied morning people like my older brother who cannot stay up past 9 PM. Every morning at 5 AM he would take great glee in kicking our butts out of bed shouting “Yer burnin’ daylight!”
This morning I wake up FULL of gas. It’s easy to figure out where the gas goes that makes biscuits rise when they don’t. I cast a sleepy eye over to my wife’s pillow; it’s empty. Hallelujah, fire at will.
For a while it sounds as if a cruise ship was sailing out of the bedroom and the captain was tugging on that rope to the big air horn for a bit longer than he should.
You know when you pass gas; it never smells as bad as other people’s?
Well, this wasn’t one of those times. It was as if someone threw open the top of a dumpster behind a busy restaurant in the middle of August. I think the blades on the ceiling fan drooped a little more than usual and the weather girl’s skin turned slightly yellow.
But it wasn’t over. I’m gasping for air and another round goes off. I can see a row of cannons on a distant hill firing a volley that echoes thru the valley below. These are clearly not “air-biscuits” but more akin to what made the Doughboys in the trenches dive for their gas masks in World War I. This must dissipate eventually, right?
Nope.
I lay there for a while before the desire to go somewhere where the atmosphere will actually support life finally overwhelms me. I sit up and see, lying silently on the foot of the bed,
my lovely wife of 22 years, her head obviously at ground zero, watching the weather forecast.
I cannot apologize enough.