Suppertime Snack: Buttered Biscuits

Just a short one, time spent with old friends takes precedence this week

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week, a short stack snack.

If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to Suppertime! I promise to feed you only once a week, and never after midnight.

I’m currently spending a handful of days with a some old friends from all eras of my life: growing up, college, the band days, and Baltimore. Somehow we’ve all come together and continue to come together as best friends, a bond that continues to grow, even if we don’t see each other as much as we used to.

I did have something longer written for this week, but I was a bit hesitant to put it out into the open without giving it some more thought and presenting it the way I’d like. So I’m either going to polish it up for next week or just save it for a later date.

Either way, my time was limited and I wanted to save it for seeing the people in my life who I don’t often get to see. It was nice leaving social media to die on the vine for a few days, to ignore emails or texts, and to focus on critically important things like disc golf, ping pong, frisbeer, fishing, campfires, and multiple episodes of Detroiters and I Think You Should Leave.

However, I’ll leave you with one short anecdote from this past week that made me appreciate how my friends and I have tricked most people into thinking we’re all grown up, but in reality we still act like we’re desperately poor twentysomethings:

On Thursday morning, we got a late start and were trying to catch the tail end of breakfast at a mom-and-pop restaurant in Mineral, Virginia. The name of the restaurant was pretty straightforward (Mineral Restaurant, go figure) and so was the food. It’s the kind of place that news reporters go in the months before an election when they’re trying to get a ground floor grasp of the local issues. Classic diner counter, kitschy items on the walls, veterans caps galore. A place where it seems that the conversations come first and the burnt coffee second. Breakfast sandwiches for five bucks, but it’s white Wonder Bread toast, a single fried egg, and a piece of ham. Nothing wrong with that at all, but the place was cut and dry. The food wasn’t the

Also, biscuits.

Or so we thought. With only ten minutes left until the lunch turnover, the waitress informed us that they no longer had any biscuits. As anyone who has been to a greasy spoon diner knows, a biscuit for breakfast is kind of an essential item for living.

However, I did notice that the table next to us (who had not left the restaurant but were standing up talking), still had a couple biscuits left in their baskets. I “jokingly” told my friends we should just grab those and we all laughed. But I knew that they knew I wasn’t joking, and they knew that we all knew that we were okay with eating those biscuits.

So when the waitress came back, my friend Andy said, “You said you’re out of biscuits but I see some over there.” To which the waitress looked at the table where her cash tips were tucked under the salt shakers and coffee mugs, and replied: “If y’all want them you can have them, I’ll heat ‘em up for you.”

Obviously, ma’am.

The waitress grabbed that basket, and then proceeded to clean off an adjacent table with another basket, so by the time it was all said and done, it was a whole “Jesus multiplying the loaves and fishes” type moment, with four warm biscuits sitting right in front of us where none had been just moments before. Who knew such miracles could occur in rural Virginia? Turns out you can try that in a small town.

The rest of the breakfast was great in the way that only a cheap breakfast can be, but nothing hit the spot like some buttered biscuits with a little bit of Smucker’s rectangle jam.

All because of an unspoken social contract between a group of friends– that even though we’re stable and successful adults (allegedly), at our very core we’ll always be who we were twenty years ago: a bunch of hungry and broke boys, trying to stay fed by any means necessary.

END OF MENU

Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

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