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Over at MSN Smart Spending, Karen Datko has kindly featured my recent rumination about whether to hang onto the stocks, bonds, gold, and cash in my IRA or cash it in and pay off the mortgage in the house my son and I are copurchasing. Nice exposure… Thanks, Karen! 🙂

Here’s an old family recipe: it came from my mother’s best friend, an amazing Pennsylvania Dutch cook. What makes these unusual is the addition of egg to the batter.

You need:
2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons double-acting baking powder (such as Calumet)
4 generous tablespoons butter, margarine, or Crisco
1 egg
Milk to fill one cup

Time: About 20 minutes
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Combine dry ingredients—Anna used to sift them together, but I don’t bother with that.

Place the egg in a measuring cup and beat it with a fork or wire whip until it is well mixed. Then fill to the one-cup line with milk. Mix egg well with milk.

With a pastry mixer or two knives, cut the shortening into the flour until well mixed—that is, until it’s about the texture of coarse corn meal. Make a well in the center and add the liquid. Work together gently with a spoon. Do not knead! The secret to this recipe is to handle the dough as little as possible.

Drop the dough by large spoonsful onto a nonstick or greased baking pan. If you prefer, you can turn the dough out onto a floured board, gently roll it about 1/2 inch thick, and cut biscuits with a small floured glass or orange-juice can.

Bake 10 to 15 minutes at about 400 degrees.

At the ripe old age of 8, my son was selected as a “Chef of the West ” by Sunset Magazine, which published his variant of these biscuits. His version:

Drop a small spoonful of the dough onto a greased baking sheet. Flatten it out a bit. Place a small dab of jam or jelly in the center of this. Drop another spoonful of dough on top of it. Gently push the dough around the outside edge to seal the filling inside the biscuit. Bake as usual.

…So the oak will grow, eh?

Speaking of the Make It from Scratch Carnival, as we were in the last post, this week’s edition is hosted by Feels Like Home, whose “Grace’s Kitchen” feature addresses issues of children’s nutrition. This week she begins a discussion of how to fit a toddler’s diet into the present USDA guidelines for the recommended 1,000 calories a day.

Thinking through your little one’s diet this carefully is the best favor you can do for your child. My mother, following the advice that was current in her time, kept few sweets in the house and did not serve desserts, but her refrigerator was always full of washed and prepared fruits and veggies, and her snack cupboard was stocked with things like nuts and other nutritious foods. She wasn’t wildly restrictive—I still ate the occasional piece of candy or bag of pretzels. But she quietly emphasized nutritious stuff to eat.

When I reached high school, my best friend’s mother would give her money to buy a sandwich, a drink, and a dessert. That’s what the kid bought, every day: an ice-cream sandwich, a can of pop, and a candy bar. One day she watched me eat the lunch my mother sent to school with me and asked, “Don’t you want some dessert?” When I said I had dessert—an apple—she visibly shuddered (!) and exclaimed, “You think an APPLE is sweet???”

She was already overweight. If she’s still living, she probably still struggles with the weight and health problems fostered by her childhood eating habits.

I think, however, that you can go overboard with insisting that not one bite of unhealthful food may ever pass your child’s lips. My best friend of young adulthood was one of those. The sole taste of sugary stuff her kids had during any given year was on their birthdays, when, in deference to the surrounding culture’s tradition, she would make them a birthday cake. This would be a heavy, soggy carrot cake. As soon as the party was over, the leftover cake went straight into the garbage (where, IMHO, it belonged…).

She was a wonderful cook and she did fix delicious meals at home. But she was such a lunatic about what her kids would absolutely positively not eat that they both went into full rebellion and, at every opportunity when they were away from home, scarfed down as much junk food as they could get their hands on. Interestingly, as toddlers both kids were prone to bouts of diarrhea. My son, who ate as healthful a diet as I could construct but was not forbiddensuch delicacies as pizza and the occasional Whopper, never once had an intestinal upset.

If there’s a point here, I think it’s that the middle road is best. Create a nutritional environment in your home that fosters healthy, whole foods with lots of fruits and vegetables. But don’t be afraid to let the kids have an occasional taste of what other people eat. Over the course of their lifetimes, they’ll come to prefer whatever you feed them routinely as their day-to-day sustenance.

Don’t forget that Funny will host the wonderful Make It from Scratch Carnival on Tuesday. Be sure to submit your contributions through this convenient form at the carnival.

Hello? There’s an alarm shrieking. Is no one paying attention? The House has approved a NINETY PERCENT TAX for the sole purpose of punishing a corporation whose executives annoy us.

Folks. The federal income tax is not intended to be used as a bludgeon.It may be against the law to use it that way.

This is a disaster for America, far worse than any economic recession could be.

Make no mistake about it. The powers that put George W. Bush in office will be back. This precedent will give them a handy-dandy tool to use against people they don’t like. And who knows? One of those people could be you or me.

That’s the whole issue about the rule of law. It’s supposed to protect everyone, not just people we don’t like.

The Times reports that “Democrats and some Republicans said the tax on bonuses for traders, executives, and bankers earning more than $250,000 was the quickest way to show angry Americans that Congress intended to recoup the extra dollars.”

“Quickest way?” We call that expedience. Another term could be stone stupidity. It’s every bit as stupid and arrogant as the Bushite theory that if a president says something, that makes it legal.

I don’t like AIG’s actions any more than the rest of us do. But that doesn’t justify trashing the Constitution in a fit of pique. There’s gotta be a better way.

This one is going to come back to bite. In a big way.

Green Panda Treehouse hosts this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance, where Funny’s rumination on the “Slow Money” idea appears. I enjoyed Pimp Your Finances’s rant about the widespread allegation that responsible savers are trashing the economy. Living Almost Large questions the long-term effect on the economy of excessive and almost universal student loans. And there’s a good essay at the Personal Finance Playbook on price-to-rent ratios, something of interest to some of us who might not have planned on having to rent out a house.

Funny’s reminiscence about nearly buying a bed & breakfast appears in this week’s Carnival of Personal Development, hosted by Health Money Success. The round-up is getting quite large. I liked this: Jacob Duchaine gives us 10 steps for getting a girlfriend. Wonder if they’ll work to get a boyfriend, too? Beyond Bounds has a nice post on “living the jobless life.” I like it!

Feels Like Home hosts this week’s Make It from Scratch Carnival; my scheme to soften laundry with hair conditioner made the cut here. And whoa! Right at the top of this carnival is Praiseworthy Things’s guide to making almond milk. In my misspent youth, I used to make that. PT’s looks better: she uses better tools and she takes her time. As a bonus, she also tells how to use the leftover almond meal to make bird suet. Wifely Steps has an interesting and beautiful-looking recipe for sautéed bitter gourd, a Filipino dish. Uh oh…chocolate addicts had better avert their eyes: 5-Minute Chocolate Mug Cake from Lighter Side. You make it in a mug, cook it in the microwave, and from the photo, it looks highly edible. At Recession Depression Therapy, Neighbor Nancy offers some encouragement and the basics about canning. If you’re gardening a lot or you have fruit trees, canning is a great way to make the most of your excellent produce. I could cite every post in this carnival: it’s full of neat ideas and fun things to do. Be sure to visit!

Speaking of Make It from Scratch, Funny will host next week, so be sure to submit your best ideas at using this handy carnival form.