Sunday, February 28. A Biscuit. A Dozen Grilled Oysters. Ho-Hum. The day was a bit warmer than it has been, but temperatures overnight are unrelenting in their nightly descent into the thirties. Still too squishy to take a walk anywhere on the Cool Water Ranch except for the gravel road. My trail in the woods is impassable, with one particularly swampy section about thirty yards long. The crawfish are becoming active; a few chimneys are rising over by the row of crepe myrtles. Woodpeckers are banging away on the dead trees. Spring isn't far away.
Breakfast was a buttermilk biscuit from a batch I baked a few weeks ago. It tasted and smelled as if it had just emerged from the oven. I have the technique for doing this down to a science. First, I underbake the biscuits just a little. I put them into food storage bags as soon as they cool to lukewarm, and put them into the freezer. At eating time, the biscuit goes into the microwave for thirty-eight seconds. At the same time, the toaster oven is prewarming itself on full toast mode. When the microwave timer goes off, the biscuit moves into the toast oven--upside down. (The thing puts out more heat on the bottom than the top.) I push the toast lever again, and after it pops I let the biscuit stay in there a few more minutes.
While waiting, I warm the milk for my café au lait, blend it, and sweeten it, all in another well-rehearsed dance. By then, the biscuit is ready, a fact I ascertain by jabbing a fork into its side. The fork splits the biscuit (much better than a knife would), and into the breach goes an immoderate slab of butter, which melts but not completely as I make my way back to the keyboard where I tap in these very words, between bites of a near-perfect biscuit.
I wrote stuff like this all morning, stopping only when the Marys informed me that we would be having lunch at the Acme Oyster House. Which, at one in the afternoon, was so busy that it took fifteen minutes for a table to open up. Even after that, the table was in the bar. But the Marys like the bar, and I was able to get more photos of the ranks of oysters on the grill, engulfed by flame when the garlic butter was ladled over their shells. A dozen of those were for me, and they were very good indeed, as usual. I followed them with a salad and half an oyster poor boy, a good deal here at ten bucks. Wedge salad in front of Mary Leigh, of course. Mary Ann ate nothing. She is approaching an important number in her weight-loss program, and that takes priority over everything else.
