Mr. FixIt was still reading the news in bed when I left to go knit yesterday morning. I stopped and picked up my coffee, found a good parking spot, and headed in to visit with my knitting crew. It was a bittersweet morning, but we exchanged contact information and vowed to try to find another venue for our gatherings. Pat, the store owner, gifted the members of the knitting group with a lovely goody bag with yarn, a knitted piece, a cute dishtowel, a pattern book, and some notions. What a sweet gift none of us were expecting.
We knitted till mid-afternoon then I ran an errand and headed home. Mr. FixIt went to town to pull the tomato plants and bring the stakes home and he wasn’t back yet. So, I jumped on the riding mower and got to work. When he got home, he started up the weed eater then the push mower. I stopped at around 4:30 to fix supper.
For some reason, I have been thinking about something Mom used to cook all the time. Hamburger gravy. Mom usually served it over toast or mashed potatoes…and sometimes refrigerator biscuits. I used to use tube biscuits a long time ago. I’ve tried over and over to get my homemade biscuits just right and…even with Miss Brenda Gantt’s Buttermilk Biscuit videos…I still couldn’t perfect them.
As I was knitting on Sunday evening, I watched YouTube videos about Appalachian foodways and found one on foolproof biscuits. Tipper Pressley writes the blog “Blind Pig and the Acorn” and her YouTube Channel is “Celebrating Appalachia”. She tells a story about trying to learn how to make good biscuits when she was a new bride. She was finally given a recipe that was…literally…foolproof.
You can watch Tipper make these biscuits by following this link.
Tipper uses White Lily Self-Rising Flour and says you don’t even need to write this recipe down. It has to be self-rising or you’ll need to add 1/4tsp. salt and 1 1/2tsp. baking powder to every level cup of all purpose flour if that’s all you have. You use two parts flour and one part heavy whipping cream. That’s it. I used two cups of self-rising flour and one cup heavy whipping cream. Stir it with a fork till it just comes together, scoop it out on a lightly floured counter top, fold it twice then pat it down with your hands till it’s maybe 3/4” thick. Cut it out with a 2” biscuit cutter and bake in a 425° oven for 12 minutes.
These were the best biscuits I’ve ever had. I liked them so much better than the ones made with buttermilk and Crisco. (Sorry, Miss Brenda!) I had the ground beef crumbled. fried, drained and set aside. I mixed up the gravy and put the biscuits in the oven at about the same time. Once the gravy was done, I added the ground beef and as soon as those biscuits came out of the oven, I broke a couple open in the bottom of a bowl and ladled on the piping hot deliciousness I remembered from my childhood.
Mr. FixIt and I watched an old rerun of Andy Griffith while we ate and I’m telling you…I think I felt my mom smiling down on me. I know my grandma was because there’s nothing she loved more in this world than a perfect biscuit to sop her gravy up with!
As soon as we’d finished eating, I hopped back on the tractor and was almost finished when I looked down and there was some weird looking piece of metal sticking out from under the mower deck. I immediately turned off the mower and went to get Mr. FixIt. It turned out to be a piece of trim inside the front edge of the mower deck that helps to reinforce it. The metal was already bent and not salvageable so he figured we could just cut it off.
First, we had to figure out how to get the mower up on ramps. Mr. FixIt bent the piece back so it wouldn’t puncture the front tire. I couldn’t drive forward because the piece of metal kept sticking in the ground. So, I backed the mower to the driveway and we ran it up on the ramps we use when we’re changing the oil. We got the saws-all and my sweetheart had that thing cut off in less than a minute so I could finish up the mowing before dark.
And that’s how our work day ended at 8:00 last night. I was super glad to have that job finished. Now, I can clean up the kitchen and I’m free to go to the farm or just sit here at home and knit to my heart’s content for a little bit. I took some more photos yesterday morning. The flowers are so pretty…what few we have.
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“The hand of the diligent will rule, while the slothful will be put to forced labor.”
Proverbs 12:24 ESV