BISCUITS AND GRAVY

I caught this link from J-Walk Blog.

My mother was a stay-at-home mom and she cooked our entire family a hot breakfast every morning. I don't ever recall having cereal for breakfast until I was an adult. I know that Cheerios were in our cupboard but I don't ever recall eating them for breakfast.

Her breakfast menu consisted of the standard bacon and eggs, pancakes, oatmeal, etc. The pancakes were from scratch and so was the oatmeal. It was real oatmeal not instant. But her real expertise was in biscuits. She made them from scratch. I don't recall for sure, but I think she probably made about a dozen at a time.

Her biscuits were typically combined with sausage, bacon, or pork tenderloin gravy for one breakfast menu and with cooked apples for another. The sausage and bacon were store bought. I don't remember the brand of bacon she used but she always used Payne's sausage. The pork tenderloin only came once a year when relatives were slaughtering hogs, therefore it was fresh from the farm. We all considered the tenderloin a delicacy because of that.

The apples weren't just any apples and they weren't store bought either. They were called Early Transparent apples and they were small greenish/yellow apples that came from trees on my grandmother's farm. They were cooked to a consistency of something like a very thick soup and had some sugar added to sweeten them. My dad would butter the biscuits heavily before I even came to the table and then cover them so they remained hot. Then when I came to the table, I would slather the hot cooked apples on the buttered biscuits and chase them with glasses of cold milk. We didn't have 2% or lowfat milk back then. It was full-bodied whole milk. Then it was off to school with my full belly.

Biscuits and apples was always my favorite breakfast, but I probably had more gravy and biscuit breakfasts. It's still a tradition in this area, but like everything else it's hard to find good gravy and biscuits for breakfast. The only good ones are what you make at home. My wife makes good sausage gravy and biscuits, but we usually only have it on Sunday mornings when her son stops by.

I can't recall the last time I had apples and biscuits. Most of the time now my breakfast consists of an english muffin or bagel, both toasted and buttered and covered with blackberry preserves and chased with (sigh) 1% milk.

From what I see and hear, the majority of kids today don't get hot breakfasts. They're getting cereal or pop tarts, etc. That's because they aren't many stay at home moms these days. That's a pity. Kids these days don't know what they're missing.

Comments

[Acidman]

Man, you gave me a gut rumble with that post. Biscuits and gravy: food of the Gods.