“Breakfast, it’s the most important meal of the morning!”

Growing up, we always heard about how breakfast was the most important meal of the day and so often we would hear about the importance of a big hearty breakfast. Sometimes when I joke around, I refer to breakfast as the most important meal of the morning. Mom always made sure we had something on our plates before we headed off to school in the mornings.  A favorite of mine as I recall was cheese toast, which was nothing more than an open-faced grilled cheese sandwich.

After moving out of the house and being responsible for my own breakfast, things changed. The reality in my world today is that breakfast all too often is an afterthought. Sometimes it’s cold leftovers from the night before, (like pizza), or a banana. It’s not uncommon to grab a Pop-Tart on the way out of the door.

Sometimes we’ll have a big full breakfast with lots of options and other times I’m thankful to grab a cup of coffee. Coffee really is the common denominator when I compare breakfast during a busy work week and a more relaxed breakfast on a Saturday or Sunday morning.

We had fun recently with a big full breakfast as we had the opportunity to cook for a group of volunteers who had spent the weekend on service projects and doing some trail maintenance at our favorite church camp & Conference/Retreat Center, Camp Allen. In the marketing leading up to the event, Sunday breakfast was billed as, “a backyard brunch of your dreams” and in another place, “a breakfast cookout with Mike”. Realizing that they would be happy with whatever we prepared, we decided to have some fun with the different titles.

We were fortunate to have a big kitchen available and did prepare a fair amount in that commercial kitchen. To stick with the backyard cookout mode, we set up a dutch oven table and fired up the coals too.

Prior to the event, we began brainstorming breakfast ideas and came up with possibilities like biscuits and gravy, scrambled eggs, bacon or sausage, fried potatoes, grits, pancakes, breakfast tacos, cinnamon rolls, monkey bread or sopapilla cheesecake, fresh fruit salad, and pigs in a blanket.

Many people have dietary restrictions either medically necessary or by lifestyle choice and preferences. As much as possible, we try to create menus that provide options so that no one is excluded. We decided this would be no exception and chose to have a hearty savory offering, something sweet and starchy, and something fresh and healthy.

While they would have been very happy with three or four choices, we decided to have fun with the preparation and provided seven different options.

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The final menu was a simple fresh melon salad, biscuits made from scratch, sausage gravy, scrambled eggs, fried potatoes with onions and peppers, Lil Smokie pigs in a blanket, sopapilla cheesecake, juice, and coffee.

It’s really not difficult to come up with menus that include food items that can be eaten by folks with restricted diets. In order to make sure that our vegan or vegetarian friends had an option, we chose to cook the potatoes, onions and peppers in olive oil rather than bacon grease or butter. We also had a fresh fruit salad that would work for them too. While vegans would shy away from sopapilla cheesecake, vegetarians would have no objection to it. For those on a Whole30 type diet or those avoiding gluten, the fruit salad, eggs and potatoes work. Some of us may be more interested in taste than health so for those future cardiac cases we had extra plates for seconds.

Speaking of seconds, we saw several go back for more and the trash cans were pretty light, so we feel pretty good that our goal of fixing something most people would like was met.

For years, our biscuits came from a Baking Powder Biscuit recipe which is a combination of all-purpose flour, baking powder, salt, milk or some other liquid, and shortening of some sort. Bill, one of our Dutch oven cooking friends, taught us about a simple 2 ingredient biscuit and that has been our “go-to” ever since.

The recipe calls for self-rising flour and heavy cream. At face value that doesn’t seem like enough to make sense to me, however when I thought about it, self-rising flour is nothing more than all-purpose flour with the baking powder and salt already added. Heavy cream can be put into a food processor, blender, or for the old-school purest, a butter churn. The result of agitating that cream long enough is fresh butter and the liquid poured off is buttermilk. Since those two components make up our liquid and shortening ingredient in our old time baking powder biscuit recipe, it’s a perfect match for the self-rising flour to create our “Two Ingredient Biscuit”.

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The recipe is simple; equal parts by weight of flour and cream do the job. If you don’t have a scale, simply start with 2 cups of flour and add about a cup and a half to two cups of heavy cream. If that is too moist a mixture, add some more flour. If it feels too dry, add some more cream. The idea is to mix the ingredients together to form a dough ball that can be gently patted down to about 3/4 of an inch thickness.

At this point it’s time to cut out the biscuits. Traditional round cuts are the most common but sometimes we square off our dough pile and use a dough knife to cut square biscuits. If we are pouring gravy over them the shape doesn’t really matter and with square cuts, there’s no excess to gather and rework for a second cutting. The real key to a light, fluffy biscuit is to not work the dough too much.

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All it takes to cook is a hot oven, about 425°, for 10 to 15 minutes. We baked ours in a Dutch oven on the porch. When using a Dutch oven, the important thing to remember is the heat distribution needs to be such that most of the coals are on the top and fewer are below.

Once the biscuits get to a light golden brown, a little butter brushed across the tops really sets them off nicely. Serve them hot with butter, honey or jam, or if you really want to clog some arteries, go for a Sausage fortified Cream Gravy.

We don’t always keep cream on hand and sometimes like to be a bit more engaged in the preparation process than just dump, stir, pat, cut and bake. That’s when we go to the old faithful Baking Powder Biscuits. I wish I knew where we found this to give proper credit where it’s due but we’ve had it for years and I don’t recall who created it.

Baking Powder Biscuits

Ingredients:

2 C Flour

1 T Sugar

1/2 t Salt


2 T Dry Milk (if water is used – omit if using milk)

3 t Baking powder

1/2 C Shortening

3/4 C Milk or Water

Directions:

Mix the 5 dry ingredients together in a bowl. Cut in the shortening using a fork or a couple of knives, until the mixture has a coarse, crumbly texture.

Add the liquid. Stir with a fork briefly, until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl and follows the fork around.

Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Pat or roll to ½” to ¾” thick sheet. Use a round cutter or open end of a small can to cut out the biscuits.

Bake at 425° for 10 – 15 minutes.