Thursday, November 22, 2012

Gratitude, Day 22

Today, I am thankful for the opportunity to enjoy time with my family.  We started off with a yummy breakfast.  I was up at 8:30 this morning (sleeping in for me) and lined a jelly roll pan with foil,


laid out what was left of the bacon (after making a pound and a half to use in my breakfast burritos),


and placed it in the cold oven.  Then I set the oven to 350-degrees Fahrenheit


and set the timer for 20 minutes.


Once that was set, I pulled out my largest pan.  Remember the sausage I made in the microwave Stack Cooker the other day for my burritos?  Well, I saved the grease to use today.  I heated it in the pan to use as the base for my homemade sausage gravy.


While the grease was heating, I mixed flour into hot tap water with my wire whisk. 


This is a trick i learned a few years ago for making the gravy smooth.  Always mix the flour into liquid before adding it to the pan.  It's been working for me. (=  The only lumps in my gravy this morning were the bits of sausage (that extra pound I cooked the other day).  I added the sausage (and a bit of pepper) once the base was at the consistency that we like.


About the time I finished up the sausage gravy, the oven timer started dinging.  So I pulled out the bacon and set it on trivets to cool.  Once I could touch it, I layered it on paper towels to drain away the grease.  Doesn't that look yummy!  And not a single grease pop on me!


One of the best parts of making the bacon this way is that cleanup was simply folding the tin foil in on itself and moving it to the trash can.  Viola!  Clean jelly roll pan!  Once I'd taken care of that, I bumped the oven temperature up to 400 and moved out of the way, so my daughter could make biscuits.  Our recipe for drop biscuits requires using baking mix, but she said we were out.  So she looked online and found a recipe for baking mix using flour, sugar, salt, baking power, and butter.


Once that was made, it was on to biscuits!  Here's our recipe:
  • 2 cups baking mix
  • 2/3 cup milk
Combine baking mix and milk.  Drop onto baking stone.  Bake at 400-degrees Fahrenheit for 10-12 minutes.

When they're done, they should look something like this:


We don't go all out with the rolling and cutting, mostly because they taste just as wonderful without all the extra work.  Besides which, making them this way was a really easy way to allow the kids to help in the kitchen when they were little.  We just never changed it when they got older. (;

Oh, and when I went to put the flour away, look what I found in the pantry:


If you guessed "a huge canister of baking mix," you were right!  That's okay, though.  It'll be used.  We'll just need to use the homemade stuff first, since it was made with butter.


Like my high-tech labeling?  And on vintage Tupperware no less. (;

While the biscuits were baking, I made grits, to which we added cheddar and Parmesan cheese and all the bacon.  Then I made over-easy eggs for each of us.  It was a very filling, homey, southern-style breakfast.  Though I admit I never had biscuits and gravy and eggs and grits with bacon at the same breakfast when I was growing up ... But when the kids are more interested in Thanksgiving breakfast than they are in Thanksgiving dinner, I'm more than willing to make it happen.

And after that meal, the other thing I'm thankful for today ... Naps! (;

I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with family, fun, and time to reflect on all those things in your life for which you have reason to be thankful.

No comments: