View from the Mountain

The Engery Saving Southern Biscuit

It seems like an impossible leap of faith that a biscuit could save energy, but I am convinced that a homemade biscuit does save energy.

You have to understand the history of the biscuit first.  The biscuit might have been the first convenience food.  In the days of wood-fired stoves it was almost a fast food. Southern cooks made biscuits because they were quick, easy, and required few ingredients.  Most of the ingredients came right from the land.

If you read the history of my mother, you will find that after her mother died that she was cooking biscuits for their family every morning.  They had hot biscuits for breakfast and often took a biscuit with them in their lunch pail when they walked to their one room school.

They lived on a mill pond and her dad, Walter Styers, was a miller. The soft wheat for the flour was grown nearby in the fertile bottom land of Yadkin County.  It was milled in Walter Styers' water-powered mill not far from the house.  The buttermilk was what was left after they made butter from the cream they got from their cows.  I can be reasonably sure that the shortening used in their biscuits was the lard that got rendered during the winter pig killing.

One of the older ladies in mother's extended family came once in a while and mixed the shortening and other ingredients for her.  All she had to do was dip out some flour and add butter milk that likely one of the boys fetched from the spring house. The spring house was nothing more than a small roof over a spot where cool water bubbled out of the ground,  Perishable food was kept there in the days before iceboxes.

The case is pretty strong that the Southern biscuit was a convenience food in the early days of the last century.  The case might be just as strong today.

My most recent and very successful foray into biscuits started two or three years ago.  It was during the holidays.  We were tired of cooking and someone suggested that I go get some biscuits from Hardee's.  A trip to Hardee's, Bojangles, or even McDonald's for breakfast biscuits is not an uncommon thing in much of the South.  My son and I went.  I did not wait in the long drive thru line but went inside got our biscuits and took them home.

Just a few biscuits ended up costing ten dollars plus thirty minutes of my time and gasoline to and from Hardee's.  The biscuits were not that great. They were greasy and huge.  Anyone who has eaten a real biscuit knows they are not greasy.

Fortunately biscuit making runs strong in my extended family so my dissatisfaction with the Hardee's biscuits put me on a path to biscuit mastery.

December 16, 2015, I got up and felt liking having a biscuit or two.  Less than twenty minutes later we were sitting down to fresh hot biscuits and I had already cleaned up the mess.

Biscuits are simple.  Currently I am using some self-rising flour from the Boonville, NC flour mill.  To roughly a couple of cups of flour I add some Crisco shortening (about three tablespoons) which is cut into the flour.  Then I mix in enough buttermilk (something less than a cup) to hold it all together. Mix or handle the dough as little as possible. Then turn it out on a floured breadboard, roll it out, and fold a couple of times. Then I use a biscuit cutter and put the biscuits in my greased biscuit pan and then into the preheated 450F oven.  Fourteen minutes later I am eating hot biscuits. A little experimenting will make almost anyone an expert.

Trust me, it is a lot easier and tastier than getting biscuits from the local fast food place.  The only gas burned is what our oven uses and our rolling pin is very energy efficient.

 

 

Sticking to the Shadows

It is human nature to want some praise for the work that you do but sometimes you accomplish more by staying in the shadows than stepping into the spotlight. While it is not written in my rules for a good life, it is there between the lines.

One rule that is in my list is leaving any organization or place where you have been better for your having been there. On the surface you might think it is easiest to do that as a leader standing in the spotlight with a title.  Sometimes it is actually far more effective to labor anonymously in the shadows.

As nice as it is to have someone publicly thank you for your efforts, you can actually get an abundance of satisfaction by just doing your job well.  There is plenty of pleasure in doing something that needs doing and no one figuring out that that you did it.

One example comes to mind easily. When I was first running Apple's federal team, we were so far under the radar, that I made up my own business cards.  We also were not a threat to anyone.  We were able to work with a lot of people in Cupertino who bought into our vision of making OS X an alternative operating system for the federal government.  We got an amazing amount of things done that made it easier to sell to the federal government and our sales were amazing.  However, we were a stealth organization.  I was in an executive briefing with Steve Jobs and he was talking to customers and turned to me and asked if we had an office in the Washington area.  Of course we did, that was where my team was based.

As our team grew exponentially and I got promoted to director, things got a little more dicey.  The second year that we were the best enterprise sales team in the world, Apple sales management decided that the best way to handle our success was to cancel the annual award for best enterprise sales team.  We had become a threat to some people who believed that Apple's best course was to be a consumer oriented computer company. 

My new title actually got me involved in a training course with senior executives.  A video presentation of mine which had customers begging for Apple and Microsoft to cooperate more became one those corporate risks that can unhinge a career.  Tim Cook loved the idea, but Avie Tevanian hated it.  Had we just kept doing it without telling people at the top, we could likely have continued on the path.

I like to tell folks that I flew too close to the sun in Cupertino and my wax wings melted.

There are lots of times in life when you sit around the table and you can accomplish unbelievable things by just being a doer without a title.  There are times when the leaders around the table will give you the latitude to do something without most people knowing what is happening until it is done.  I have never been one to do things behind folks backs but sometimes change is easier if presented as a done deal.  Getting something done which has to be done is far better than having a group paralyzed because not enough people understand what needs to be done.  I can attest to the results of that.

The best possible situation is that people trust you enough to tell you to fix the problem and call if you run into a bump in the road.  That also works great in the reverse.  One night I was having a late night email exchange with Tim Cook, Apple's current CEO. At the time he was COO and vice president of sales.  He asked me why I had not been able to get Apple federal online store up and running.  I told him exactly why.  The total exchange between the two of us was less than ten lines.  The next day I got a call and by the end of the week we had a federal online store.  It sold $12M in product the next year even though we were forbidden to advertise that it existed.

Doing a job well is its own reward. I learned that from my mother and I live by it.  Whether it is scrubbing mold off a boardwalk, taking a picture or putting the finishing touches on a big proposal, if it is worth doing, it is worth doing well even if you remain in the shadows.

I got a nice note from our company's CEO today.  No one saw it but my wife.  I will take that private note to walking across the stage at Apple and getting an award.  In today's world there is no sense in making yourself a target.

As a side note, this is post number 1400 from me on View from the Mountain. I have been writing posts here for eleven years. While I write more at my Crystal Coast Life blog, last month was probably the only time in those years that I have missed posting here.