I love biscuits.
I love gravy.
Biscuits with gravy is a beautiful harmony that is truely a sign that God loves us. Anything that tastes that good, ya know like chocolate, and coffee and biscuits and gravy is a blessing.
For most of my adult life I have attempted off and on to make good biscuits. I did the ones off the box of bisquick, and scratch biscuits, ones with all purpose flour and ones with self rising. I used buttermilk and plain milk, shortening verses lard versus butter. I tried everything that everyone suggested and never had that great a biscuit. I finally just fell back on my Granny’s recipe of opening a can lol. But as things get more expensive, biscuits are not cheap anymore and do you realize that a batch of biscuits costs about 25 cents to make?
I know the secret and there are two that really matter in my opinion. First of all, don’t over mix, it can make the crust too hard, but most importantly you need to actually make a very thick batter not a dough.
So, handle it only as much as you need to and add enough milk that it is super sticky and soft and you will probably be doing good.
Here we go biscuit tutorial 101 (Wish I had found this 18 years ago but oh well hard lessons learned are lessons not soon forgotten.)
First off, heat the oven to 425
In a bowl combine
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 tea salt
1 1/2 tea sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
and whisk this very well together or sift it several times to combine. cut in 1/3 cup butter flavor shortening, lard, reg shortening or butter or a mix of any of these into the flour until you have pea sized pieces. You can use a pastry cutter or your hands – whatever you like.
I always used a pastry cutter but my friend Bess does it this way with “the one God gave me” and I kind of like doing it this way. 
When your done, make a well.
Then, stir 1/3 cup buttermilk with 1/3 cup reg milk and add two or three extra tablespoons of regular milk. Drizzle this over the crumb mixture tossing it all together lightly.
Once it is nice and wet/sticky – (you may not quite use all the liquid) Here is what mine looks like, it’s really soft, wet and sticky. Like thick batter.
Turn it out on a well floured surface, if you don’t need alot of flour, you don’t have enough milk in it.
Pat it – keeping flour on your hands and sprinkled on top to 3/4 inch to 1 inch thick. Here’s another newsflash, they don’t rise, they are about the same thickness as you roll them, so make them as thick as you want them to be, then the baking powder will basically make them airy and fluffy, but not much taller.
Cut the biscuits, and do not twist as you cut, push straight down.
Put them on a lightly greased dish, I also blow off the extra flour on top and spray with cooking spray - bake 10 – 12 min on the top shelf.
Life is good with good biscuits. They take about 25 minutes start to finish…so not abig time commitment either and I think I’ll try wholewheat and olive oil to see if I can make a healthier biscuit.
And here is a cute picture of Mr Vincent man.
A picture of the girls dresses I spent the last month making by hand
The fabric is SO pretty, it doesn’t show up well here – here is Elizabeth dress I also made for her first communion that was canceled….we don’t know when she will get to have it, but we should find out this week. I still have to put buttons on it, and then it’s done.
A close up of the collar and fabric so you can see the beautiful embroidery. It really came out lovely.
Ta Ta For Now!
