Mother’s Day means two main traditions around our house: 1) Dad makes biscuits for breakfast, and 2) Dad tries a brand new recipe for dinner. Which usually leads to a third: Dad makes a huge mess in the kitchen.

I enjoy cooking. But I don’t do it often enough to where I really know the arrangement of things in the kitchen. I’m always looking for things, which usually leads to a fair amount of stress, as I’m often supposed to be adding the ingredient I’m looking for right now!

So when we ran out of baking powder mid-way into making biscuit dough it should have been a stressful moment. But not this time. While I may not know the layout of my wife’s kitchen cupboards, I DO know where our food storage is. I immediately knew to check the box on top of the partial wall along one side of the kitchen. The one labeled “Baking Powder”, where we keep extra cans of baking powder (amazing how that works). But we were out there, too.

Not to worry. I know my wife would not leave us short on baking powder. She’s too good a shopper for that. She’d have stocked up as soon as she knew we were running low. She just hadn’t gotten as far as putting them in the box atop the wall yet. So where else would she put them? Downstairs storage closet, of course. Easily found. Probably avoided.

And that’s how food storage saved Mother’s Day (or at least Daddy’s hide).

Lauren over at Path Across has posted her experience in having her herb garden die so that we can learn from it.

It’s not easy to admit defeat, especially when I like to go around  telling people that they ought to use their backyards and front yards  and porches to grow gardens.  Especially when I look forward to the day  that I have the space to grow my own “edible jungle.”  How can I do  either of these things when I can’t even nurture a windowsill herb  garden? 

There is a class of people who claim that they have a  “black thumb,” i.e., they end up killing any plant in their immediate  vicinity.  I’m afraid I might be one of those people.