7-24-10 Mom's Homemade Biscuits & Sausage Gravy!!!!

Sorry for the delayed posting. We headed down to our lake house for the weekend. As previously stated, our goal is always to be reasonably healthy. We normally observe this M – F and enjoy our weekends. That said, in honor of being at the lake, it is the weekend, and we were pretty good most of the week, I give you…Mom’s Homemade Biscuits and Sausage Gravy!!! My 83-year old Mother has made homemade biscuits all of my life every Friday morning.  I think everyone in our family savors these time-honored treasures. Mine will never be as good as Mom’s even with her recipe, but here goes my best effort to honor my Mother!!!

Stuff you’ll need:

1 ½ cups flour
3 Tablespoons of shortening (Mom uses butter-flavored Crisco)
3 teaspoons of baking powder
1 teaspoon of salt
¾ cup of milk
Jimmy Dean Reduced Fat Sausage (don’t tell Mom we use reduced fat)
Land O’ Lakes Reduced Fat Stick Butter
Mom's Homemade Strawberry Preserves (sorry, these are very hard to come by!!!)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Melt 1 tablespoon of shortening on a small cookie sheet (really need a biscuit pan!!!) in oven. Mix all ingredients thoroughly with spoon in mixing bowl to form dough. Knead 6 – 7 times on flour-covered cutting board and flatten by hand to ¾ inch thickness. Cut biscuits using cookie cutter. Wad up remaining dough to make one last SUPER biscuit!!!! Remove pan from oven. Drag cut biscuits through melted shortening and flip over, spacing evenly on pan. Bake at 375 degrees for 16 -18 minutes until brown.

Cut sausage in ¼ inch thick patties. Melt 1 tablespoon of Land O’Lakes Reduced Fat Butter in cast-iron skillet (no Calphalon at the lake) on medium heat and cook sausage for 6 – 8 minutes to suit. Remove sausage and add 2 tablespoons (about three forks) of flour to remaining grease and allow to brown for 1 minute (like make roux) still on medium heat. Add 1 ¼ cup of milk and boil until gravy thickens. Salt and pepper to taste. Make sure to scrape all the goody off the bottom of the pan before transferring gravy to bowl!

Another tip from over 50 years of eating these biscuits…if any of them remain after breakfast, open them with a fork and add a pat of butter and allow it to melt. Consume these biscuits later in the day with crunchy peanut-butter and a Dr. Pepper (ok, these days it’s a Diet Dr. Pepper, but you get the idea).

I hope you enjoy these as much as my family has for all these years….may Doris Cook’s Homemade Biscuit legend live on in your family as well!!!
Enjoy!!!
BC