It’s salad season and lettuce is snuckered into nearly every meal, at least at our house, so I want to get this recipe for Ranch dressing out to you quick, before it’s too late.

My family loves Ranch dressing. They tolerate my homemade dressings, but they adore Ranch. Seeing as they are thrilled when we have chef salads (and Ranch dressing) for dinner (you ought to see Sweetsie shovel the greens down her gullet—she could win competitions), I don’t make an issue of buying the plastic bottles of premade stuff. I would’ve preferred to make my own but figured that Ranch was like Oreos: unduplicable (made-up-word alert).

All that changed the other week when I was talking on the phone with my friend Amber and she nonchalantly said that she started making her own Ranch dressing when she came across a recipe for it over at Pioneer Woman’s blog. Amber had never really like salads (gasp) and she didn’t even like bought Ranch dressing all that much (double gasp), but she took a shine to this homemade Ranch dressing. I promptly looked the recipe up and made it. Everyone loved it, and I beamed with pleasure as they pitch-forked the mounds of greens into their mouths and Miss Becca Boo declared, “I love when you make chef salads, Mama.” Sweet words, no?

The next time I made it, just a couple days ago, I made a double batch. I had even saved an old Ranch bottle so I could fill it with the homemade dressing.

Which proved to be a lot more difficult than it sounds. I was talking on the phone to my mom while I attempted to fill the bottle and the poor woman endured an exhaustively detailed description of what I was doing. I was already grumpy, and the dressing-into-bottle dilemma only served to amp up the Grump Factor. My funnels were either too big, or too small, and pouring it in directly was disastrous, so I was reduced to sloppily teaspooning it into the bottle. Very grumpily. And then I wondered (out loud, of course, to Mom) if I could make a paper funnel, and then it hit me—my cake decorator bag! I fitted the bag (minus any attachments) into the neck of the bottle and poured. It was so painless that it almost made me happy.

Now that the mess is cleaned up and I have a large bottle of homemade Ranch dressing in my refrigerator, along with a little bottle of the extra, I am very happy indeed. I am not grumpy any more. (That probably has more to do with the fact that my kids are quietly playing and I’m getting some precious writing time, but we’ll ignore that for the sake of this post topic and say it is the bottle of Ranch dressing that has lifted my spirits, okay?)

Ranch Dressing
Adapted from Ree’s blog, Pioneer Woman.

Amber said that she subbed yogurt for the sour cream and it turned out delicious.

Ree calls for fresh herbs, of which I only had parsley. I’ve written the recipe down as I made it, with the fresh herb options in parenthesis.

Some other optional ingredients (according to Ree—I didn’t try them) include white vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, cayenne pepper, paprika, fresh oregano, and Tabasco sauce. Another recipe I looked at called for fresh basil and red pepper flakes. There’s plenty of room for creativity.

I’m giving you the doubled recipe; halve it if you doubt me.

2 cups mayonnaise
1 cup sour cream
1 cup buttermilk, well-shaken
½ cup fresh parsley, chopped fine
2 smallish cloves garlic, minced fine
2 tablespoons chives, dried (1/4 cup fresh, minced)
1 teaspoon dill weed, dried (2-4 teaspoons fresh, minced)
1/4 teaspoon salt
a couple grinds of black pepper

Mix all the ingredients together. Store the dressing in an airtight container in the refrigerator.

I never said anything more about our chickens ever since I informed you that we got them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They first lived in the trailer-wagon house that Mr. Handsome rigged up for them because his chicken tractor wasn’t quite ready. A lot of them died while still in the trailer-wagon, which was to be expected since these chickens were the leftovers from the neighbor’s Big Chicken House Cleaning—they were not cream of the crop stock.

My kids, especially Miss Becca Boo, loved the chickies, checking on them all the time, feeding them, reporting on the new loses. One of their jobs was to remove the dead birds from the wagon until Mr. Handsome got home from work and was able to buried them.

Don’t you just love how I made my kids do the dirty work? It’s proof that I’m a really smart mama. At least that’s my take on it.

Note how Yo-Yo is breathing—through his mouth with his cheeks all puffed out.

Even when we finally got the chickens into their spiffy new house, they still occasionally died.

Mr. Handsome got really sick of burying birds; however, we may have a really good corn crop this year—the corn will grow tall and green … in splotches.

We’re down to thirty-three birds now. Actually, we’re down to thirty-two birds and one Dolly Parton. See, sometimes the chickens didn’t want to walk forward when Mr. Handsome moved the heavy chicken tractor, so they’d slip out under the temporarily-elevated bar. Once Mr. Handsome didn’t see one of the chickens and … oh dear, I don’t know if I should tell you this but… he set it down on the poor bird. SQUAWK! Of course he lifted it right up again as soon as he realized something was wrong, but the bird was changed for its short life—its one breast protrudes wa-ay forward. So now Mr. Handsome refers to the birds as “Dolly and Her Crew.” They cackle in harmony.

Just kidding.

Dolly and Her Crew are going under the knife on Saturday. Our method is nice and simple. (Nice and simple for me, I should say, seeing as I don’t have anything to do with the knives and necks.)

We use a killing cone and it’s really quite tidy—no headless chickens running around spritzing everything with sacrificial blood (and no, we do not believe in animal sacrifice—it’s just that I’m reading about the Hmongs right now and they do, so when I think of killing chickens I think of the Hmongs … but really, we’re very different—they sometimes butchered their chickens, or pigs!, inside their houses). That is, as long as they’re fully dead when you lower them into the kettle of hot water, but that’s another story.

We’ve butchered chickens two times before. We processed (oops, that’s a nice word) twelve the first time and about eighteen the second time. The second time around we all—my siblings, my Tiny-Little Brother’s friend, a foster kid, and my little sister Rose (through the Big Brother Big Sister agency)—congregated at my parents’ house for the day-long event.

This time my brothers and my parents are congregating at our house, no extra helping hands and nearly twice as many chickens. It will be a long day. Except that now we’re really experienced and know exactly what we’re doing—nobody will be uncool enough to go accidentally plopping a still-alive chicken in scalding water.

Family Story: When my Tiny-Little Brother was really tiny and little, as in two-years-old, we butchered rabbits. He curiously watched as my father hung them up, cut their throats and skinned them, but then he innocently asked my dad, “Are you going to hang me up and make me dead, too?” My father sent him in to the house.

This is the same brother who will dissect and eat anything. Just a few years back he fried up a pan of locusts and munched away. (He even got Miss Becca Boo to eat one—we have it on video.) Moral of the story: If you allow your children to observe the butchering day goings-on, it won’t be long before they will be happily crunching on honey-dipped locusts.

When we’ve butchered, my kids mostly watched from a distance.

They weren’t crazy about the events, but they weren’t traumatized either. It’s just life.

Some parts of life you wrinkle up your nose at but you do anyway, like cleaning the bathroom. Or eviscerating chickens.

My father is a science teacher, so he’s good at that part. Maybe I’ll have Yo-Yo and Miss Becca Boo de-assemble and rebuild a dead chicken—homeschool science 101.

I’m only partly kidding.

What will I be doing all the blood-letting day long? Feeding people, of course: we’ll be feasting on honey-baked chicken, egg salad sandwiches, and liver pâté with crackers. Just kidding! I’ll be sticking with a vegetarian dish of baked lentils and cheese because I do have my limits.

When nobody wants to eat anymore and I can’t invent any other pressing chores, I’ll be grimly plucking pin feathers and whining: This is sooo disgusting. I don’t know why we are doing it. The smell! The mess! Gross.

And I think it would be cool to raise hogs. Huh.

Ps. We’re not the only crazy chicken killing people around. For more stories look here and here.

Back when I made that rhubarb pie, I said that the cream cheese pastry recipe would make more than you actually needed. I said there was a reason I was giving you a recipe that would cause you to end up with leftovers, but I didn’t tell you what that reason was. Now, a couple weeks later, I’m ready to tell you why.

Sunday confession: I do this to my kids all the time—order them to do things without giving them any reason. I tell them I’ll explain later, but I am not usually able to put them off for five minutes, let along a couple weeks, thanks to their vigorous pestering. You, on the other hand, have been everlastingly patient, and as a result I’m racked with guilt over how I’ve so brutishly abused your gentle natures.

I can just see it now: every time you open your refrigerator door you see the tightly wrapped disk of white dough sitting on your fridge shelf (because I know that every one of you made that pastry dough within two hours of me posting the recipe) and you suck your teeth, furrow your brow, give your heads a shake, and then reach passed the dough for the jar of grape jelly before softly shutting the door.

Such visions leave me feeling so forlorn… Let’s move on, shall we?

What you’re going to do with those pastry scraps is this: roll them flat, sprinkle them with cinnamon sugar, cut them into squares, and bake them in a hot oven. I’m not sure why it took me so long to tell you something that’s really that simple. I probably could’ve even twittered it ’cause that sentence was less than a hundred and forty characters. But now that I’ve gone and been long-winded, I’ll say a little more (because I like characters of all ilk—literary, human, cartoon…).

These pastry scraps bake up (in a literal sense—they rise like biscuits) into melt-in-your-mouth little bits of goodness. They are sweetly unassuming, tender and flaky and rich. Mr. Handsome and I kept saying, “Mmm, they taste like something … like … um … yum … not sure what … mmm.” It wasn’t until I had downed a goodly number of the treats that I realized what they tasted like: puff pastry! (At least I think they taste like puff pastry—I can’t remember when I last ate puff pastry, so I’m not sure how I know they taste like puff pastry. Still, I’m convinced that’s what they taste like.)

Cinnamon Tea Biscuits
Adapted from The Pie and Pastry Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum

It is of upmost importance that you fully bake these tea biscuits. If they are at all under-baked, they will be doughy in a very yucky and disappointing way; in other words, bake them as long as you possibly dare. When they are baked to perfection, they are flaky, crispy, and utterly irresistible.

These are best eaten the same day they are made. I suppose you could freeze them as soon as they’ve cooled, but I didn’t try that—we ate them up too quickly.

Leftover cream cheese pastry
4 tablespoons white sugar
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon

Combine the sugar and cinnamon and set aside.

Remove the leftover chilled pastry dough from the refrigerator (if you froze the leftover pastry, allow it to first thaw in the refrigerator) and let it sit at room temperature for about ten minutes. Roll it really thin, as you would for a pie crust.

Sprinkle half of the cinnamon sugar over the top of the pastry. Press the sugar into the dough using a rolling pin. Flip the pastry over, sprinkle the remainder of the cinnamon sugar over the pastry and press it into the dough with the rolling pin. Don’t worry if some of the sugar falls off—enough will stay sweetly stuck.

Cut the pastry into whatever geometric shapes you desire and scatter them about on an ungreased baking sheet. Bake the cookies at 450 degrees for 10-15 minutes.

Cool and eat, or store them in an airtight container.