Biscuits & Jam for....

If I had a pantry, this stuff would have been eaten instead of being left in the back of this low deep dark cupboard, all year. But that is not the subject of this post.



Some canning. Canning is a short subject in this post but not the main idea.
The little blue bucket is healthy shortening if there is such a thing. I do feel better with ORGANIC on the label. Better as in less guilty. Guilt is the subject of this post.



Kayla cleaned out the low dark, and deep,cupboard, and found all this that we forgot to eat. Whoops. Those are Danish sweet pickles and they are insanely delicious and easy peasy to make. When the cucumbers come in I'll show you how.That will be a future post.


Southern buttermilk biscuits. We are getting closer to the subject.




Peach Preserves, a mini theme.


and biscuits with coffee, the essentials of life in the South,

make for a man that is happy. He gave a big thumbs up to this breakfast. He likes his biscuits rolled out thin because he likes crust and crunch. Believe me these biscuits are flaky and tender, melt in your southern mouth!



I feel a little guilty. You see I practically hounded my friend Debbie, (as in was a pest) for her biscuit recipe. When she did her post for "Sky High Biscuits" that recipe was in Karey Swan's cook/life book, "Hearth & Home," which sits on my book shelf. Whoops... I already had it right here.

However, but, or therefore, actually that is not what I might be feeling guilty about.

We made peach preserves last night. I say we, because the Hunny does the peach picking and the peach cutting and most of the peach cooking and then I can it.

He is a country man and when his mom made preserves she cooked the fruit, the whole fruit skins and all, minus the pits, for a long time. When you simmer about 2 gallons of peaches all day until they are a fraction of their former selves; you have real fruit preserves. I can not describe to you the taste.

Imagine if you will concentrated fresh home grown peaches. He put 2 cups of sugar in the 2 gallons and noooooo pectin. It's basically just fruit. We only added a little sugar because the peaches were too tart. This is what PRESERVES is all about, let me tell you.

What?

Oh, feeling guilty?

Well, that would be about the biscuits.

When I looked at the recipe and it is a good recipe, I just thought to myself,

"That is not how mom made biscuits."

Before I knew what was happening, Mom was making those biscuits with my hands and some type of long term memory, right brain stuff. It just came back to me as soon as I scooped some flour in the bowl.

Then I added a half stick of soft butter and 2 big round spoonfuls of that organic shortening, and then I poured some salt into that little round hollow you can make in your hand that holds the right amount of salt, then I scooped up 2 big heaping tsps of baking powder and worked it all together. Mom called that "cutting in" the shortening.

Then I just poured buttermilk into the center, yeah about that much, to hold it together. I floured my board and scooped it out gently and lightly covered it with flour because it's sticky stuff. From out of my memory banks came that voice in my head that said, "OK now handle it gently and don't over work it or you'll have tough biscuits.

I said, " Yes, mom, I remember," and they turned out perfectly.

I have some really cute biscuit cutters, just like Cathy's at the Noble Pig, but next time I make them, I'm going to use a water glass, dipped in the flour.

This going back to my roots trip, is really beginning to get cool, and I will stop feeling guilty about the biscuit recipe now.

Next time, I'll show you step by step how to make biscuits. I couldn't interrupt my mom today
( she died a long time ago!) while she was talking, ( in my head) that would have been rude. Actually, I was so surprised to remember something this well, I was afraid to break the train of thought. It might not have come back!