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I am aware that it is an evil thing to plant such a stubborn earworm into your heads, dear friends, when I could just have easily said that I'm going on vacation at the end of the week.  But hell, that would have been easy.  Besides, the writing slump/existentialism virus has been stubborn this year, and so I find myself seizing on any little nugget of inspiration I can find, no matter how misguided or embarrassing.  Ain't too proud to beg.

After two months of waiting very, very patiently, I am now four days away from flying to Denver, where Snow will pick me up and drive me to Snowballville for a week's rest and highlarity, which includes a weekend at the Estes Park Wool Market in the company of Snow, Carole, Margene, Kristi and a veritable plethora of new friends.  Without giving too much away, I can confirm that we are all going to have something swell for dinner on Saturday night, although I'm casting a nervous eye at the Weather Channel, wondering if it's such a good idea to keep the oven running for a long time.  I wonder if anyone would object if we just had pie for dinner.

This is my first proper vacation of the year, and the first time off I've had since the day I went to the DMV in March.  I am overdue a proper holiday, and it shows.  I have spent much of the year in a weird, underachieving, sleepwalking state, and as we move closer to summer, it has only become worse.  It is this state that has caused me to forget my manners, namely in neglecting to mention by name the folks who provided such fabulous company at Sam's New York foodbloggers' roundup at the Hudson.  (Let's rectify this now:  in addition to our lovely hostess and her companion, the famous Fred, and my fabulous pals Julie and Luisa, I was lucky enough to meet the Chocolate Lady at In Mol Araan; Ann at A Chicken in Every Granny Cart; Josh at The Food Section, his wife Danielle and their daughter Anya; Roboppy at The Girl Who Ate Everything; Jen at Cookin' in the 'Cuse (whose description of tea at the White Dove Tea Room makes me want to drive to Syracuse *right now*); Meg at Megnut; and Adam at The Amateur Gourmet.  The afternoon passed in such a happy blur of chocolate, more chocolate and an extortionately-priced-but-tasty strawberry caipirinhas, that exact details of our conversations are eluding me right now, but I do remember that Meg, Adam and Adam's fella Craig were extremely patient and forbearing as I yammered on about the history of eggs in baking.  Thank you all for not bouncing your drinks off my head.)  It is also this state that leads me to make decisions like buying twenty pounds of fruit on a weekend that falls between a business trip and a Monday morning 8:30 a.m. customer presentation, and turning it into 40 jars of jam.  And it is the state that leads me to flirt with baking disaster, the kind about which I am philosophical and understanding when it happens to other people, but which I see as a sign of impending doom when it happens to me.

Normally when I make something in large quantities, any desire I have to actually eat tends to pall about two-thirds of the way through the task, but with this jam, I found that the more finished jars I stacked up in the kitchen, the more I wanted to have this jam on something.  We were out of bread; by the time I was done, I was too exhausted to even think of mixing up bread dough (I only had the strength to join Lloyd in a double feature of Drink-Drank-Drunk and Sunset Boulevard); and we were out of soda crackers.  As I was falling asleep, it hit me:  Biscuits.  For breakfast.  Buttered biscuits with rhubarb and strawberry jam.

Although I really love biscuits -- they were one of the first things I learned how to bake, and I always get a little thrill when I see them on restaurant menus -- I tend to take them for granted.  They're easy to make, fast to bake, nearly impossible to screw up, and equally good in their sweet and savory forms.  I have a library full of biscuit recipes, but I tend to rotate among three of them:  the recipe from More Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin, with buttermilk replacing the milk; the recipe on the back of the Bakewell Cream tin, with buttermilk replacing the milk; and the recipe for Angel Biscuits from Shirley Corriher's Cookwise.  Then a certain friend of mine made some noise about the best biscuits ever, and I knew I was helpless.  I also knew that there would be no question of subbing buttermilk for the sweet milk for which the recipe calls, as 'mouse and I have had spirited discussions on making substitutions in recipes one has not previously tried.  I'm too stubborn to concede the point to him in general, but even in my most cantankerous mood, I would not screw around with a man's best biscuit recipe. 

If you have ever made biscuits, you know the rhythm:  dry ingredients in a bowl, mix, mix, mix, cold butter, cut into chunks and rubbed into the dry ingredients until they take the texture of coarse cornmeal, add milk and stir just until thoroughly blended, turn out and knead a couple of times with a very light hand, roll or pat the dough out, cut, cut, cut, and into a hot oven with the lot of them.  Because I like to avoid a tough biscuit at all costs, I usually use a 50-50 mix of all-purpose flour and pastry flour for my biscuits (and my pie crusts), and I did so here.  Even with the pastry flour, I spied a tiny little amount of spring to the dough, a sign that it was developing gluten, getting springy and resilient, a precursor to tough, chewy biscuits.  Since letting the dough rest is a good way to keep it from getting overworked, I decided to cover the dough and wash a few dishes.  As I washed the dishes, still pleasantly absorbed in the kitchen dance, I thought about how, with the exception of those nasty biscuits in a tube you find in supermarket refrigerator cases, I had never had a truly awful biscuit, not even at fast food restaurants.  I thought about the tanginess of commercial buttermilk biscuits, and whether it really comes from buttermilk or just a surfeit of salt, and whether those biscuits are even made with butter anymore, or do they use butter-flavored shortening, when the realization fell like an asbestos curtain, smacking me roundly in the head.  Butter.  I had mixed the dry ingredients together, then had mixed in the milk, turned the dough onto the board and kneaded it.  No wonder it was starting to spring back.  I hadn't provided that extra layer of insurance against excessive gluten development by blending in the butter.  Moreover, I couldn't do it now.  It was too late.  Everything was mixed in.

Fortunately, I had enough of everything except pastry flour to make another batch.  Into the garbage went the old biscuit dough.  Into the bowl went more flour (all all-purpose flour, this time) and salt and sugar and baking powder and cream of tartar.  This time I remembered the butter, and this time I was rewarded with a dough good enough to eat raw, although I am happy to report that I did not, save for a little taste to make sure the seasoning was correct.  I rolled the dough, cut out 15 little biscuit rounds, baked them to blondness after 12 minutes, decided to keep them in the (turned-off) oven for a few minutes to get a little bit more browned, and there we were:  we had the world's best biscuits for breakfast -- non-buttermilk-version, anyway -- and a jar of a fairly decent jam to put on top of them.

It was not until hours later, when I was stealing another extra biscuit from the breadbox, that I realized that the dough I had so unceremoniously thrown out, the butterless dough, had the basic structure of naan dough, and had I thought to heat up a cast-iron skillet at the same time I had turned on the oven, I could have had biscuits and a rather nice naan for lunch.

Vacation, all I ever wanted.  Vacation, have to get away.

Edit:  If you have ordered jam from Bakerina Kitchens this weekend, and are wondering if it will be shipped before I head to Colorado:  have no fear.  Bakerina Kitchens takes its fulfillment details seriously.    If you would like to place an order and have it shipped this week, please send it by 7 a.m. (EDT) on Wednesday, June 14, and I will ship it before I leave.  Otherwise, I will be glad to resume shipping after I return to New York on the 21st.  Either way, thanks to everyone who has ordered, joined the mailing list and/or offered advice and encouragement.  You gladden a bakerina's heart, you really do.

I am glad to report that I did not drown myself in the froth, nor did I start any large kitchen fires.  I did, however, manage to get sugar syrup in eccentric locations all over the kitchen, as well as my own elbows.  I also managed to learn some valuable lessons, the most valuable being this:  Just because you have a 15-quart kettle does not mean that you can fit an infinite quantity of fruit and sugar into it.

It's a picture, isn't it?  (Well, yes, it is a picture, but you know what I mean when I say it's a picture.) Specifically, it's a picture of the moment immediately after I strained off the syrup, brought it to a boil, skimmed the foam off the top, brought the syrup to 221F and then added the fruit back to the pot.  It's a technique I learned from Christine Ferber's inspiring and illuminating Mes Confitures, one that is a departure from the method I usually use, and which results in a brighter, cleaner fruit taste, and a texture that retains the memory of the fresh fruit.  It does beautiful things to both rhubarb and strawberries, giving them the appearance of stained glass and the taste of summer.  It makes a jam that doesn't look particularly spreadable; then you realize that you can squash those berries flat against your toast with a knife.  It makes your kitchen smell like pure red fruit.  It would have made for a perfect Sunday, if only I hadn't had the bright idea to cook the whole thing at once. 

Chef Ferber directs us to bring the fruit and syrup to a boil together, skim the surface, simmer for at least five minutes, and then test for a set.  I can now attest that it is impossible to bring the fruit to a good rollicking boil when you are devoting all your energy to nudging the fruit threatening to boil onto the stovetop toward the center of the pot.  I couldn't even do a sheeting test for fear of the whole surface displacing and zizzing onto the stove.  Ah, well, I thought,  Might as well put the canner water on to boil, and set to work lifting the kettle off the stove.

It is an odd thing to realize that even though you can bench-press 75 pounds, and though your balance and alignment has become better with stretching exercises, you still can't lift a pot of jam off the stove.

Fortunately, a solution was at hand:  Find a place to put the stuff, bang it in the fridge, and forget about canning it until such time as I was not suffering a complete nervous collapse.  I don't know what it says about me that I have 12-quart heavy plastic food storage containers around the house, mostly for storing flour or cookies, but at that moment, I was very, very glad that I had them.  The jam had a safe, cold place to stay; I did not have a complete nervous collapse, and I was able to wash all the pots, get a shower to remove the sugar from my elbows, and go out to play with an exaltation of food bloggers, all of whom were invited to eat chocolate and tell stories at the Hudson Hotel with the lovely Sam, who is visiting New York this week, and who is a crackerjack hostess even when she is thousands of miles away from home.

You might be thinking that the jam in this picture looks a bit thin, more like a sauce than a preserve.  You would be right.  Fortunately, this can be corrected by cooking it off in batches, adding the juice of an additional lemon for every four quarts of jam, and bringing it back up to 220F before putting it up in jars.

I should have 39 other beauties just like this one by Friday night.  Right now I have 13.  Every time I go into the kitchen, I find myself staring at them, enchanted by the color, wondering whether it's too late to make a batch of buttermilk biscuits, or whether I should just wait for breakfast.

Edit:  The link, she is up!

It should be either the one bold, brilliantly-timed move that catapults me into a better future, or it will be a monumental failure, resulting in financial agita, serious questions about my sanity, and teenaged levels of stress-induced acne.  In the kitchen right now are thirteen pounds of rhubarb and ten pounds of strawberries, literally stewing in their own juice, aided by equivalent weights of sugar.  As soon as I return from my early-morning run to Zabar's for more mason jars, I will have what I hope are dozens of jars of rhubarb and strawberry jam.  It is, literally, the batch that will make or break Bakerina Kitchens.  But this is another story for another time, namely, the time when the jam is finally put up, sometime this afternoon.  Until then, dear friends...have you ever wondered what thirteen pounds of rhubarb, eight quarts of strawberries and their body weights in sugar look like?

Edit:  Mercy.    I am happy to report that there is rhubarb and strawberry jam, and lots of it.  Alas, I can't add it to Bakerina Kitchens just yet, as it still needs to be decanted into jars.  Once it is, though, linkiness will follow.

Before I get any hate mail from any denizens or native sons/daughters of Piscataway, New Jersey, I hasten to mention that I am not, in fact, comparing Piscataway to hell.  It's just that I am a bit more sluggish than usual tonight, thanks to the whirlwind 24-hour trip I took to Piscataway yesterday on LuthorCorp's behalf.  My pal and fellow toiler T, with whom I am now working, has been courting a fairly big-deal customer, and this morning she and I, along with our boss and a few other packaging brains, were invited to show a room full of people what we can do.  Overall, I think we made a persuasive case for Better Packaging Through LuthorCorp; we did get to have a nice dinner together last night; and I was back home in Astoria in plenty of time to miss the thunderstorms that are now pounding the neighborhood.  The bad news is that I am laid low by fatigue, thanks to a two-day sinus headache that has only just released me from its clutches, and that on Monday morning at 8:30, we'll have to do it all over again for another customer, although this time we won't have to go to Piscataway to do it.  Add to this my continued state of undersleep, underexercise and overfeeding, and you might ascertain that I am not feeling my own brand of bakerina goodness tonight.

Fortunately tomorrow is another night, and a Friday night as well.  I have ingredients for butterscotch pudding, one of Lloyd's three favorite things to eat in the world; tomorrow night, he will get his.  My mom arrives in New York on Saturday, when we will commence our first yarn crawl since her return from Paris ten days ago.  Local strawberries are in, which means Bakerina Kitchens will get its rhubarb and strawberry jam after all.  And even in my sleepy, molasses-brained self, there is cause for celebration:  Snow's childhood friend Grace has brand-new twin sons; my pal Karen's son Ryan gets to moosh his very first birthday cake all over his face today; and my dear friend and official jam brain-trust Stephanie is freshly arrived in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where she is the 2006 Tyson Fellow at the Writer's Colony at Dairy Hollow, in the very suite where I myself lived just about two years ago.  We do live in fine times, dear friends, we really do.