I had the most wonderful night! My neighbor two houses down and across the street lives alone and is 96, and she will be 97 next month! She is delightful lady. Getting the motivation to leave the house after supper takes some prodding for me but I really enjoy visiting her. She is a night owl like me. Tonight I called to see if it was a good night for a visit and she said yes!
When I got there, she had a bag of flour on the counter and told me she had been trying to decide whether to make biscuits. She really wanted some, but….
I told her I made biscuits just once about twenty years ago and they were terrible, and I asked her if she would teach me to make biscuits. (My mother was a true Southern lady but was raised in a progressive orphanage in the 1930’s that trained the kids in all the necessary skills for life, and because she was such a good seamstress they never made her do the kitchen work rotation to learn to cook. We ate canned biscuits!)
As you can imagine, there was no recipe. Just a bit of this and that, squish it with your hands, shape it with your hands, pat them flat one more time, and pop them in the oven. No, we don’t need to preheat and the temperature doesn’t matter a lot, just anywhere from 450F to 500F and she didn’t know how long, we would just look at them now and then.
As you can imagine, they turned out great. I was able to get the strawberry jelly wrestled open for her and we had a late night snack. She offered me decaf coffee but I decided to wait and have my drink when I got home – this little beauty.
Of all the teas I ordered for fall and winter evenings, I really had no idea this one was going to be a big favorite. I think it is probably a shelf staple now. I think of oatmeal cream pies, not as chocolatey as I thought it would be but just right for what it is. I love it.
Ingredients so I don’t forget: around two cups of self rising southern biscuit flour made of soft winter wheat, one stick of butter, and almost 3/4 cup of milk, adding 1/2 cup and then extra as needed. That’s it. She didn’t really measure the milk but I watched and eyeballed amounts that she poured so I could try it this weekend on my own.
The oven was set to 455F and my guess is we cooked them for about twenty minutes. So yummy.
This one totally tastes like oatmeal cookies!
How absolutely fun! Does she also cook “a mess” of assorted vegetables? That was one of my grandma’s cooking terms.
What a delightful evening!
My mother always made a “mess” of green beans or a “mess” of field peas! As we ate the biscuits last night, I told my neighbor that my father would have said, “Now this is fittin’”.