Strawberry Shortcake

I fixed strawberry shortcake for supper the other night. Actually I fixed Jared’s Sweet Biscuits with strawberries and Cool-Whip, because when I looked for a recipe online (all my cookbooks were in the fire), I came up with the children’s cartoon heroine from the 80's. So I modified my usual all-purpose quick bread recipe for this purpose. But seriously, the recipes for scones, cookies, biscuits, donuts, rolls, and cake are all very much the same, with only the subtlest difference in ingredients, and most of the difference in the shape it is cooked in. I favor the blob shape for most of my cooking.

It is only the 30th of April, and my asparagus at the house is already about 4 feet tall. I actually didn’t know asparagus could grow that tall, for some reason I assumed it grew in 8-12 inch long bundles roughly 3/8 inch in diameter each and held together with blue rubber bands. So the real life appearance of my experiment in asparagus has been educational. The first year I got angle-hair thin wisps of asparagus, the second a few straw colored stalks with fringed tops, and this year I get tall, thick, fairly macho looking asparagus stalks, albeit not many of them. Actually, I get one per plant at the moment. But they are real long, so that makes up for the lack of numbers right? Well,.I’ll harvest some this week and see how it is, although I have some desire to see just how tall it can grow and if I can enter a 17 foot stalk of asparagus it in the county fair this fall.

The rhubarb looks great, and barring another assassination attempt by a former roommate, should yield both pie and cobbler this year. And maybe, just maybe a bottle or two of wine?

In truth, despite my culinary/agricultural adventures, things are pretty quite right now, which is nice, but leaves me with little to blog about that would interest anyone like you. Went down to Phoenix to refresh my EMT and went to a party each weekend, running into friends I haven’t seen since high school. In one case I was forced to reconcile the image of a kid I harbored with the full grown veteran of 3 tours in Afghanistan and Iraq in an Airborne Ranger machine gun squad, who stood before me with his bikers jacket and unit insignia. It was sobering.

I got offered a position with Raytheon in Antarctica for this fall, but it is an alternate position, and won’t deploy unless the primary in my slot is unable to go. I don’t know what my odds are or really any more details, but since I only found out Friday, I’ll call tomorrow and get more info.

Otherwise, life goes on. Working a bit, doing what I can for HURAH and Haiti, and so on. Probably won’t be very frequent updates here until I come up with an excuse to leave town or otherwise make plans for something interesting. Which won’t be long, I reckon.