Biscuits and Gravy

Hi all!
This is one of my favorite comfort foods. This is what I make when I miss my granny and my home. Its so simple, I had a hard time writing stuff down because I don't use measuring cups or measuring spoons normally, just like grandma.  Every summer until I was 12, we'd make the annual pilgrimage to Park Rapids, Minnesota where Grandma and Grandpa had a wonderful summer home. The house wasn't huge and you usually had to share a bed with a cousin or 2, but it was fantastic! It was a long trip, 12 hours and 30 minutes in the car without stopping for gas or potty breaks (which you KNOW never happened) so we'd normally get up around 4 or 5am and drive until we got there only stopping when we had to. Each trip was well worth it because I knew at the end of the REALLY long drive was a place of magic and wonder. A place where choke cherries, raspberries, and blackberries grew wild. Where we had to worry about bears visiting the yard in the night, and where you could swim, fish and hike until your heart was content. A state where you kidded that the state bird was the mosquito because those suckers (no pun intended) were HUGE! And a place that smelled like earth and pine trees on a cool foggy morning.  This was also where Grandma would make you biscuits in gravy 3 times a week because she was the coolest grandma ever.
To give you a bit more information about this wonderful woman, while I was smaller my vocabulary was a bit limited and so was the vocabulary of my 3 girl cousins who would normally be up there the same time as we would. So one year, we decided grandma needed a nickname and the only "g" word we could come up with was gruesome. To this day we still occasionally call her granny granny gruesome, and everyone it tickled by our ridiculousness 20+ years later. The best thing in the world is her smile and I hope I'm as pleasant and sweet as she is when I grow old. Matt hopes for this as well, or that he goes first.
Now that I'm older, I have the pleasure of occasionally getting to cook for my wonderful grandma. Heck I cook for anyone who wants to come eat, but its especially a treat to get to feed and return the favor to all those wonderful family members who kept me fed and showed me the true meaning of comfort food.

Biscuits and Gravy

Ingredients:

1 can of Grands Biscuits (can be the low fat variety!)

1 roll of sausage (can you turkey or pork sausage, spicy or mild, whatever your preference, so long as it's 1 to 3/4 lb of meat!)

4 c. milk (I use skim but 1-2% is tastier)

4-8 TBS flour (sifted)

Bake the biscuits according to the manufacturer's instructions 

While the biscuits are baking, start browning the sausage and brown until thoroughly cooked. Drain as much grease as you can and return to pot

Sift 4 Tbs of flour over the sausage while heating on medium heat

Stir well and allow the flour to coat the sausage and cook for 1-2 minutes

Add milk and continue cooking until thick and bubbly

It looks a bit yellow because there was still a bit of grease, and that's OK

Add salt and pepper to taste

If the gravy is not thick enough for you, sift more flour into the gravy, and if its too thick for your liking splash in a bit more milk. This recipe is very forgiving and easily modifiable. Serve up the gravy over split biscuits and revel in their simplicity. On another note, it will get thicker as it cools, so if you over thicken and have extras, you can always add back a bit more milk to thin it out before you re-heat it.

Garnished with Thyme

This recipe can be made with any type of sausage you like so long as it ground and not the hard salami kind. I've had it made with Chorizo and if you can get passed the ingredients that make it up, chorizo biscuits and gravy are AMAZING!  Also, if you like a spicier gravy you can add cayenne pepper, but don't use the cheap stuff or else you'll end up with pink gravy. One of Matt's favorite stories was coming home with me and I wanted to make biscuits and gravy for the family. Dad asked if I could make it a bit spicier so I grabbed the $1 giant bottle of cayenne pepper I'm pretty sure my mom never even opened. I dumped in about a teaspoon of the red granules and stirred diligently. It was at that moment I had to call into the family room to ask if they minded pink gravy because no matter what their answer, that was what they were getting.  Both Matt and dad looked at each other, grinned and said, "Sure." The pink gravy wasn't so bad, but it sure looked funny!

On a more serious note, I hope this recipe which may be a bit off, because like I said I usually don't use measuring cups and measuring spoons, makes you has happy and full as me. I hope that you can have as many beautiful memories of friends and family over food as I do.

This is the woman who inspired this recipe. The bottle she's holding is not indicative of her personality, just her great sense of humor. Who couldn't love a grandma as cute as this?

Happy Eating!