Slice of Life: What a Day!

It was a full day — the usual reading, writing, and art-making, plus baking gingerbread blondies. If I could have stopped there, I would have been happy-tired.

Then came two hours of animated read aloud plus snowflake cutting, followed by the cleaning up of the glorious mess of snippings, all of which pushed happy-tired into satisfied-exhaustion.

There was still dinner to make, though, which luckily was an easy standard casserole from my childhood made from a recipe with a note at the top that never fails to give me a shiver of connection to all my dinner-making ancestors: “November 1949 Women’s Day Kitchen.” When I got to the final step, the assembly of the layers, I discovered that we had no Bisquick.¹ Sigh. At least it wasn’t raining torrentially anymore, and I was pretty sure that the nearby UDF would have Bisquick. Which they did.

When I took the bag out of the box, I noticed some powder in the bottom of the box. “That’s odd,” I thought, then grabbed the one-cup measure out of the open drawer in front of me and started filling it. As I filled the measuring cup, I realized that I was simultaneously sifting powder into the open drawer. But how? What was going on? That’s when I (holding the bag over the counter now) investigated the bottom of the bag to find that though it had been crumpled enough to pass at first for closed, it had completely missed the sealing process at the Bisquick factory. It was wide open and now there was a pile of powder on the counter along with the liberal dusting in the silverware drawer and, I discovered as I stepped away from the chaos, on the floor as well.

At this point, AJ came to the rescue. Giggling and making light of the mess, he de-fused my impending meltdown by bagging up the remaining Bisquick, fetching the shop vac to clean the counter, drawer, and floor while I finished assembling the casserole. I popped it in the oven, did all the dishes, and had exactly three minutes to collapse on the couch before dinner. Now I was full-on, head-to-toe, blurry-vision exhausted.

What a day!

¹Bisquick was invented in 1930, in case you were wondering.

HAMBURGER COBBLER

1 sm. onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 lb. hamburger
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. pepper
1/4 tsp. marjoram
1/4 lb. sliced cheese (white smoked cheddar takes this recipe to a whole new level!)
1 can drained tomatoes
2 T Worcestershire sauce
3 T ketchup
Bisquick

In a small bowl, mix together the tomatoes, Worcestershire sauce, and ketchup. Saute onion and garlic, then add hamburger and seasonings and brown the hamburger. Make one recipe-worth of Bisquick dough (as per directions on the box). Spread hamburger mixture in a 9×9″ baking dish, put cheese on top, then the tomato mixture. Add blops of Bisquick on top. Bake at 450º for 25 minutes.