The morning arrived with palpable excitement as I knew I would be spending the day at the Farm under Dad’s tutelage as he schooled me in the fine art of baking. He has become quite the master baker and I was so happy to apprentice under his skilled hand. With rockin’ 50’s oldies keeping the beat in the background, we baked buttery biscuits for breakfast, a pair of towering, gorgeous loaves of bread, one for each of us and two light and flaky pie crusts, one crust for me to take home and one for the base of a Lemon Meringue pie.
After the initial hugs and the excitement of getting togehter after a dry spell, the first order of business was making biscuits for breakfast. Dad had me measuring, sifting, kneading and cutting out rounds in no time flat. Well that was easy. Ha! Not so fast. Dad realized we made our whole first batch with all purpose flour instead of self- rising flour causing us to toss the whole batch and start over. Not a sterling beginning but we rallied.
A new batch of biscuits was buttered and ready to go in the oven while Dad tended to the bacon that had been slowly cooking. He prepped the sausage gravy and whipped the eggs. While Dad removed the bacon and set it aside to cool, I added milk and salt and pepper to Dad’s gravy base and stirred and stirred and stirred. As the gravy began to thicken, we switched places and I scrambled the eggs while Dad babysat the gravy. In a matter of minutes, everything came together and we sat down to breakfast with Janice, Jill and Levi slathering local honey and butter on mouth-watering biscuits.
With a hearty breakfast under our belt we were back in the kitchen preparing for my next baking lesson, homemade baked bread. Dad had all the ingredients laid out and I started weighing and measuring. We warmed up a couple bowls of water to commence the yeast to activating and then began adding ingredients to the stand mixer. After many minutes of kneading, the mixer finally started producing the tell tale sound of a dough that’s ready to be set aside to rise. We removed the dough and with our hands kneaded it into a smooth round ball and then placed it in an oiled bowl covered with plastic wrap and left it to rise and double in size.
While the dough was doing its thing, we took a little break and went outside. We walked around the garden and picked some veggies for me take home with me and admired everything that was in bloom.
Back inside the dough had finally risen and it was ready to be divided in half and placed in two loaf pans to bake.
With the loaves out of the oven, we sat down to a lunch of homemade chicken salad and pimento cheese on slices of bread fresh out of the oven. We had definitely worked up and appetitive and it was amazing.
Fortified with our wonderful lunch, we proceeded onto our last lesson for the day, pie crusts. Crusts are finicky and after hundreds of crusts, Dad has discovered a nearly fool-proof recipe and barring any bizarre circumstance. it turns out perfect every time.
Lemon Meringue was the chosen pie for our homemade crust and my mouth was puckering in anticipation. While Dad made the meringue I worked on the filling stirring the sugar, cornstarch, salt, lemon juice, zest and water over medium-high heat until it came to a boil after which I added butter. Mmm…butter. The next step was to take half a cup of the hot sugar mixture and slowly whisk in the egg yolks. Here’s where the recipe can become a real deal breaker. If your sugar mixture is too hot or you add the eggs too fast, you have sweet, lemony scrambled eggs. There are no words for how horrible that sounds. Fortunately for us, everything came together perfectly.
Baking is indeed an art and requires finesse and skill acquired after executing countless recipes and an abundance of trial and error. Dad has already traveled down these roads and has accumulated a wealth of knowledge and lots of tips and tricks that he happily shared with me.
