Showing posts with label breakfast. Show all posts
Showing posts with label breakfast. Show all posts

Thursday, March 27, 2008

cobble, cobble

Turkey goes with Thanksgiving.

Peach Cobbler goes with Easter.

Say what? Yes, you read that correctly. Though I guess what I really should say is that Peach Cobbler goes with Good Friday.

Always.

I eat Peach Cobbler once a year. I don't know when it started, but I'm guessing it's been my whole life (minus the occasional Good Friday that fell over spring break, though often, if we were already in the condo as opposed to in motion, it was made!). Growing up we ate our peach cobbler for dinner, with milk. There was as time when I was a bit older, my Bro and I joined the relatives for cobblering - and I came to find out that some of them ate their cobbler for dinner with ICE CREAM. I felt robbed.

If you have 'wheat bowls' - you eat your cobbler out of this vessel. They are yellow bowls, with a white circle center, with, get this, a picture of wheat. They are china, and have a gold rim - making it a BAD idea to reheat cobbler in the microwave in a wheat bowl. I do not have wheat bowls. I believe my father to be in possession of the family collection, and unfortunately, he didn't bring them for this year's consumption (which was at my house). He won't be making that mistake again.

When I met Druggy, his family wasn't all that receptive to the idea of eating just cobbler for dinner. So, when we're with them, I make the cobbler for dessert and usually manage to choke down whatever it is that my mother-in-law is serving. It's a real sacrifice for me, as she's usually serving lobster. The horror.

On with the cobbler. Here's 'my' - aka, my mother's recipe. It's never the same twice, but it's always good - perfect for GOOD Friday.

It starts with Bisquick. I make the recipe for biscuits and then I add a bit of sugar and some cinnamon (or a mixture of cinnamon and other cinnamon-y spices - like nutmeg). These series of pictures were taken at my in-laws, and thus, the background provides some interesting tidbits. The one related to this picture is the FF on the milk...meaning fat free. Such a thing does not exist in my house.

After the cobbles are mixed up, I turn to the pan and peaches. I always use canned peaches. I know my mom has sometimes mixed frozen and canned. The frozen have a much stiffer consistency, and I prefer mush, so for me, it's canned. I use about 3 of the large cans for the 9 x 13 sized pan.

It was at this point in my pictoral documentary of peach cobbler making that my MIL wanted to know why she didn't get any attention with the blog and picture taking. So here she is cutting up the lobster for the kids' plates.

Back to cobbler - though the lobster looks good doesn't it?? Okay, once the peaches are in the pan I sprinkle them with flour (this helps thicken the sauce that also went into the pan with the peaches...so um, don't drain them). And because I so love cinnamon, I sprinkle them with that, too. Lots of that.


Next comes adding the cobbles. You can be really anal-retentive and roll them out like biscuits and use a cute little cutter and then lovingly place the cobbles on top of the peaches in some cute pattern. Or, you can do what I do and treat the cobbles like drop biscuits. (The fun tidbit in the background in this picture is the butter warmers for the lobster. I'm the only one in the family that eats mine with 'plain' butter, as opposed to lemon pepper butter. So there's a two-fer on the fun fact tidbits).


And so this is what it looks like when it's headed into a 350 degree oven for about 30 minutes.


And this is what it's gooey, warm goodness looks like when it's ready to eat. I would recommend ice cream. But milk works too. Or just plain. And always make enough for breakfast the next morning.

Monday, March 3, 2008

meat and gravy...yum!

In the early years of my marriage, when I only had ONE child (and I don't even remember what THAT was like!), we lived just under a half an hour away from my parents. My mom retired right before Yahoo #1 was born and so she capitalized on our proximity by having weekly "Grammie Days". It saved me a day of running a Yahoo to day care, and gave Grammie and Yahoo a great opportunity to run around town. Often their trips included the breakfast buffet at Big Boy and then a trip to the local library for story time. It was during these Grammie days that #1 Yahoo grew to love sausage gravy. She loves it so much she eats a bowl of it for 'dessert' after breakfast. So, what loving mother wouldn't try to learn to duplicate said gravy? I tried, once, to make sausage gravy from scratch. It's not that it was too hard, it was that the amount of work didn't result in the flavor I wanted...had it been spectular, I would have made it again. Alas, it was not.

Then we spent a weekend at my parents house and the secret was revealed. My mom found the easy way to make it.

Here's my recipe for "As Good as Big Boy's Sausage Gravy"

Pick up this bag of gravy mix from GFS Marketplace (that's Gordon's Food Service).
Follow the directions on the bag.


I add browned Bob Evans breakfast sausage to this. Thus the SAUSAGE gravy. I usually buy one tube and cut it in half and save one half for future use in the freezer. I also do this with their Mild Italian Sausage which I use in my calzones and pasta bakes.


Now, are biscuits hard to make? No.
If you make them with Bisquick are they even easier? Yes.
What's the easiest way to make biscuits? Open a tube. One tube of 8 Grands biscuits is more than enough for one breakfast with our Yahoos, with a few left over for um...leftovers.

There you have it. It was consumed so rapidly that I don't have a glorious, tantalizing picture of the finished product. Suffice it to say, however, that Yahoo said it was as good as Big Boy's.