Allow me, please, to introduce you to Strawberry Shortcake With Milk On Top, your new best friend.

I grew up eating strawberry shortcake like this, for supper. It’s simply biscuits, berries, and milk—a heartier, more filling version of the gourmet, whipped creamy affair, but still glorious indeed, simple and lush, eaten with complete abandon since there was nothing else offered to fill up on.

It went something like this: one of the first hot evenings of the summer would find Mom standing at the kitchen sink in her empire-waist sundress, her thick hair frizzing about her head and her glasses slipping down her nose, rapidly topping a big bowl of berries, just-picked from the garden out back. The tray or two of biscuits that were baking in the oven would be making the kitchen even hotter (and everyone crankier), so she’d declare we’d eat out at the picnic table and Jennifer, get the old plastic tablecloth out of the drawer, and Will someone come fill up the water glasses? Dad would come into the kitchen to carry out the heavy tray loaded with filled glasses and bowls and clanking spoons, and the rest of us would trail behind, bearing milk, sugared berries, and the trays of piping hot biscuits, the back door slamming shut behind us.

We’d crowd around the wooden picnic table, bare knees bumping, the evening breeze tickling our sweaty necks. After whizzing through a rendition of Johnny Appleseed, we’d fall to, crumbling biscuits into our bowls, smothering them with berries and drowning the whole mess in cold milk. The simple food quickly filled our tummies and muted our tempers, but still we’d eat, gorging on the glorious sweetness until our stomachs distended and our eyes glazed over.

Summertime bliss, that’s what strawberry shortcake suppers are. Try it for yourself and see!

(Note: it may be cultural, this love of dousing baked goods with milk. One of our favorite lunches, growing up, was peanut-butter-and-jelly-bread with milk on top. Even now, my brothers like to put their shoofly cake or apple pie in a bowl and then pour milk over top. So I don’t know, maybe you have to grow up with this kind of food in order to enjoy it. On the other hand, maybe not?)

Strawberry Shortcake With Milk On Top

The original recipe calls for all white flour, but I use half whole wheat. Whatever you do, keep it simple—which is the whole point of summer suppers, after all.

For the biscuits:
1 cup flour
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons sugar, plus more for sprinkling
4 tablespoons butter
3/4 cup milk

Mix together the dry ingredients. Using your fingers, cut in the butter. Stir in the milk. Drop spoonfuls of the batter (it’s thick like cookie dough) on to a greased cookie sheet. Liberally sprinkle each biscuit with more white sugar. Bake the biscuits at 425 degrees for 10-15 minutes.

For the strawberries:
1-2 quarts strawberries, washed, topped, and sliced
1/4 – ½ cup sugar

Mix together and set aside till ready to serve.

To serve:
Crumble one or two biscuits into a bowl. Spoon strawberries over top. Drown in milk. Devour. Repeat.

About one year ago: Ranch Dressing.

My kids know me. The other night I walked into the kitchen as Mr. Handsome was in the middle of scolding Yo-Yo for doing something mean to The Baby Nickel. As I passed by the table, I shot Yo-Yo the most heavily weighted, reproachful look I could muster. And then Yo-Yo piped right up, “Don’t shoot me a reproachful look, Mom!” Dang! That boy knows how to hit the nail on the head—thunk!—dead center.

We’ve been reading the book What The World Eats by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio, Menzel being the same fellow who wrote Material World. The kids and I were discussing the world obesity problem (did you know that there are now as many overfed people in the world as underfed?), and I explained a little about Michelle Obama’s efforts to curb child obesity. Miss Beccaboo said, “When I get big, I’m going to work in a school and be a cafeteria lady and feed everybody your good bread!” That girl knows how to melt my heart.

Later, after picking some strawberries from the garden, Miss Beccaboo came into the kitchen to wash, top, and slice them. Along the way, she discovered an old onion bag and put it on her head like a hairnet. Already playing the part of food service maven, my girl is.

Remember those ridiculous outfits my children were wearing the other day? Well, here’s a picture of their craziness. I particularly like Miss Beccaboo, waggling her finger like an old school marm.

And look at her stance! Hips thrust forward, arms akimbo, chin jutting.

She makes me feel like I’m living a real-life slapstick comedy.

Back to What The World Eats. My kids notice everything in the pictures: the rotting teeth, the porky bellies, the bottles of soda, the lack of silverware. We were all floored by the amount of meat reportedly consumed by an Australian family of seven: more than fifty pounds of meat a week. I got constipated just looking at the picture!

Our meat consumption is considerably less than those particular Aussies, but I still feel like it’s on the high side. We eat between three and eight pounds a week, I think—maybe a couple pounds of ground beef and a chicken (they weigh in at about three pounds). We eat bacon, sausage, and ham, too, though I usually use them to season dishes, not to fill us up as the main course. We do eat lots of eggs, though—well over four dozen a week—and a fair amount of cheese. It would be a fun (but tedious) exercise to assemble all the food we eat in a week and snap a picture of it. Maybe sometime when I’m bored.

When we do have ground beef on hand, one of my favorite ways to serve it is in chili. It’s a simple dish and everyone likes it. I’ve taken to adding dark chocolate to the mix.

Doing so makes me feel like Tita in Like Water for Chocolate, subversive and sensual. I feed the chocolate-spiked chili to my family and then watch for strange symptoms—the tearing off of garments, unexplained weeping, giddy laughter. All of which might happen, mind you. I just can never be sure that it’s on account of the chocolate. I can assure you, however, that no one has streaked across the yard buck naked and jumped on a strange man’s horse.

Yet.

I’ll let you know if that changes.

Chocolate-Kissed Chili
Adapted from Simply In Season

You can pretty much do whatever you like with this recipe. Want more green pepper? Put it in. No garlic? Take it out. A hotter dish? Pump up the chili. The biggest discrepancy is with the beans. I like a lot of beans in my chili, but I know other people like less. Do what you will.

Keep in mind that leftovers freeze well.

1 pound ground beef
2 ribs celery, washed and diced
½ cup diced green pepper
1-2 onions, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced, optional
2 quarts stewed tomatoes (not drained)
2 cups corn
4-8 cups cooked beans (red, black, pinto, etc), semi-drained
2-3 tablespoons chili powder
2 teaspoons salt (may use part smoked salt)
1 ounce dark chocolate

Garnish and accompaniments:
Fresh cilantro
Sour cream
Cheddar cheese, grated
Hot sauce
Tortilla chips, cornbread, or flour tortillas

Cook the beef, celery, pepper, onions, and garlic in a kettle over medium-high heat till the beef is beginning to brown and the vegetables are tender, about 10-15 minutes. Dump the contents of the kettle into a crockpot and add the remaining ingredients. Cook on high heat for 4-6 hours, stirring occasionally. Taste to correct seasonings and serve. (Turn the heat back to low if not digging in immediately.) Serve with the garnishes, all the time keeping a sharp lookout for strange men on horseback.

About one year ago: Fowl-ness

Confession: I am often bored.

I realize that this statement is tantamount to blasphemy, considering that I have four kids, a husband, a large garden, a blog, and that I homeschool, read, watch movies, cook much of my food from scratch, go for walks, talk on the phone, chair a church commission, clean house, etc. With all that responsibility you would think The Boredom Feeling wouldn’t even be on my radar.

But alas, I am not only sometimes bored, I am often bored.

I know, I know! Something is seriously wrong with me.

I’ve always been this way, ever since I was a little kid lollygagging on the living room floor, the oppressive cloud of Nothing To Do pressing me down into the ratty brown carpeting. My mother didn’t cater to my whines, not one little bit. I got oodles of lectures on the value of productivity, so many, in fact, that the P-word became my most hated word in the whole entire English language. (Now that I’ve grown, the P-word and I are on very friendly terms, though it hasn’t done much to solve my boring blues.) And more often than not, if I fussed to her that there was nothing to do, I found myself with a damp rag in my hands, listlessly dusting the kitchen chair rungs while resolving to never, ever confide in my mother again.

Now I have my own house, my own ratty brown carpet, my own chair rungs and I still get shadowed by the Nothing To Do cloud. Now, however, the cloud is more like a mist, damp and creepy, seeping into the corners of my being, pushing on me from all angles, slowing me down.

This is not depression, mind you. In fact, for the most part I’m an optimistic, up-beat, cheerie person (except for when I’m not). I manage and accomplish just fine. But I perpetually struggle to keep myself motivated.

I think that I might be a fruitcake to have this problem. I know no one else who battles boredom like I do. I am surrounded by people who never seem to have enough time in the day, who have projects going from morning to night and who are able to keep themselves motivated, moving briskly from project A to project B to project F and so on.

Me, on the other hand, I piddle and fritter and sigh. I force myself do things. I maintain.

There is certainly plenty to do, but for me boredom is not an absence of things to do but a lack of pressure. And this is the crux of the matter because I don’t like to be pressured. (Oh the ironies!) I limit my social engagements, stridently protecting our quiet country life, keeping our evenings free for reading, movies, popcorn, and lots of chit-chat. I am careful not to tax myself with too many commitments. But then, with too much freedom and not enough pressure, I lose steam. I get bored. With the reverse, too much pressure and not enough freedom, I get irritable and tense. It’s a balancing act of the most intricate sort, one I have yet to master.

After suffering under the boredom curse for my whole life, I have come to believe that my inclination towards boredom is not a character flaw, but rather a personality trait. Certain people are never bored; other people are. It has something to do with wiring. (Yo-Yo and Sweetsie get bored a lot [and it irritates me to no end]; Miss Beccaboo and The Baby Nickel do not.)

I don’t have an answer for why or how I’m bored, but I do know that I’m a high-needs person (just ask my husband, or my mom). I need to be fed, intellectually and emotionally, on a pretty extravagant scale. No matter how many inspiring books I read or radio shows I listen to, the country life is sometimes deficient in intellectual stimulation for little ol’ extroverted me. (Living in an isolated Nicaraguan village for two years was pure agony for my needy self, physically painful, exhausting me in ways I had never before experienced.)

(“Absorption.” This might be another way of looking at the issue. I have trouble staying absorbed. There are a few specific times that I am fully absorbed: working on photo albums or something artsy, writing, meaningful conversations.)

Some days my life is frenetic. Days when I have errands to run or appointments to keep. Days when the garden is in full riot and I’m up to my elbows in canning jars and sauces and salsas and peaches. But still, even when life is intense, I find myself fighting the draggy boredom blues.

I just thought you might like to know that about me.

Oh yes, and that I spice up my boring life with a set of fat, waxy lips.

I think everybody ought to have a pair for when the going gets dull.

About one year ago: Cinnamon Tea Biscuits