As promised, I will now share my sausage gravy recipe with you. I developed my gravy-making skills fairly late in life because, for whatever reason, we didn’t eat much gravy at home growing up. In fact, the only time I remember eating gravy at all was during Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. But those weren’t cream gravies. It wasn’t until I got married that I learned anything at all about cream gravies.

I’ve talked a lot lately about comfort foods and to my husband, comfort food means gravy. He loves meals like fried chicken with mashed potatoes, cream gravy and corn. He also like biscuits with sausage and cream gravy. Well, I’ve never fried a chicken in my life so he has to go home for that type of meal, but I’ve learned how to do one thing right: biscuits with sausage gravy. Continue reading →

Canned biscuits caused our ruination!

That was the subject of an e-mail I received after my last biscuit post. Who knew biscuits could stir such passion! Apparently, when canned biscuits made their debut, many women quit making them from scratch, even in the southern states.

Even in Tennessee where I’m from, when canned biscuits came out, women quit making homemade ones except for my grandmother who is 90 years old and still going strong. We live in Texas now and it amazes me how many people have never had a great homemade biscuit.

Carmen, the reader who sent the e-mail, went on to explain to me some of the real secrets of making great homemade biscuits and I am now forever in her debt! Continue reading →

When I arrived here in California, my Nana and Grandpa were up at the family cabin in the Sierra Nevadas. When they came back a few days later, Nana had a present for me. She had found an old baking book tucked away in the kitchen and thought I might enjoy looking through it. Continue reading →

Although nothing can replace the experience of enjoying a cappuccino with good friends at your favorite bar (or local Starbucks, if you don’t happen to live in Italy), sometimes it’s just as nice to sink down into your favorite chair, cradling your favorite green cup, savoring the smell of freshly brewed espresso that has filled the entire downstairs of your house, admiring your creation — the perfect, creamy froth, the faint dusting of cocoa powder just clinging to the edge of the cup, waiting to be swept into your mouth with the first sip, the heat from the cup warming your hands as you know it will also warm first your mouth, then your throat, and then your entire body as a sense that maybe your life isn’t so bad after all slowly takes hold of you. And then you take the first sip.

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From Egg in a hole, Toad in a Hole and Eggy in a Basket to Hobo Eggs, it seems that everyone calls this breakfast treat by a different name. But from now on I will call it Egg in a Nest thanks to a comment left on my Flickr photo! An egg tucked into a piece of bread and fried? Prior to 2006, I had never heard of such a thing. The first time I saw it was not in a kitchen but inside a movie theater. Actually, it was in a kitchen in the movie. V for Vendetta to be exact. Of course I didn’t realize that it was something that people actually ate in the real world. Continue reading →

While staying with my aunt and uncle, I made several batches of scones in a quest to create a new recipe. The first batch were wonderful and buttery, but almost more like shortbread than a scone. They quickly disappeared along with the homemade meyer lemon curd. Among others I tried were lemon buttermilk, lemon currant, and Apricot Cream. Although none of them were bad, these apricot cream scones were by far my favorite! Continue reading →

There are so many yummy pumpkin bread recipes and photos floating around right now that I couldn’t help buying some canned pumpkin at the store yesterday. I had been planning on trying out one of the recipes I’ve seen lately but instead I decided to experiment. The recipe I came up with is similar to the other whole grain muffin recipes on this site with the exception that I used maple syrup to replace some of the sugar this time. The maple and pumpkin flavors are great together and these muffins are really nice and moist.

I ate one (ok, maybe two) of these with cream cheese this morning while they were still warm and I highly suggest trying them that way! Continue reading →