Breakfast With The Hawthornes. Homemade Biscuits With Sausage Gravy.

Youngest Hawthorne is home. Both our boys' favorite breakfast is homemade biscuits with sausage and gravy

and we aim to please.

Mr. Hawthorne has the honors of cooking the sausage and making the sausage gravy.

Mr. Hawthorne cooked up his sausage we picked up at Southern Packing on 168 going to Chesapeake. He left a few broken-up pieces of sausage in the pan and added a couple tablespoons of Wondra Instant Blending flour. Cook the flour.

Add in about a cup of milk, slowly, stirring.

Add in some onion powder.

A few grinds of pepper. Oooh. Check out Mr. Hawthorne's left pinkie.

A few grinds of salt. Poor Mr. Hawthorne. Last Sunday morning, Mr. Hawthorne was julienning potatoes for hash browns. Unfortunately, he julienned the tip of Mr. Pinkie. It's finally stopped bleeding.

Here's his sausage gravy. And here's Youngest Hawthorne's favorite breakfast. Homemade buttermilk biscuits with sausage and sausage gravy. Rosie is in charge of the biscuits. I used to make hockey pucks for biscuits, but I persevered. I kept trying. I never gave up. Now I make lovely biscuits. I'm quite proud of myself. It used to be that Mr. Hawthorne did all the biscuit work. I would try. Always unsuccessfully. I was like a dog with a bone and I finally mastered the biscuit. Gimme a whoot, a shimmy, and a hip check. Here's my biscuit "recipe." I actually wrote it down. I never have measured before, but I know what to put in. Here's your starting point.

Rosie's Buttermilk Biscuits 1 1/2 cups King Arthur unbleached flour 1 tsp baking powder 3 TB butter, in pieces 3 TB lard, in pieces 3/4 cup buttermilk salt and pepper

Baking powder into flour.

Salt and pepper in. The way I do my butter and lard (You could substitute Crisco for the lard, but one time I was out of Crisco and used the lard and my boys said those were the best biscuits I'd ever made.) is to put small pats around the bowl and gradually work the pats in, one pat at a time.

Use a pastry blender and do NOT overblend. You do not want uniform clumps. You want them all different sizes. This is what gives you a nice flaky biscuit.

Slowly add in buttermilk, stirring with a fork. Bring the dough just together.

Lightly spread flour over your working space ...

... and turn the shaggy dough out.

Push out. Fold over. Maybe three times. Just to get the dough in a ball. Do NOT overknead here.

Pat or roll the dough about an inch thick.

Cut out with biscuit cutters.

Lightly roll the excess dough and cut more biscuits.

I like to crowd my biscuits in my pan. Helps them rise higher. Brush with melted butter and bake at 425 degrees until tops are nicely brown. About 15 minutes.

Lovely, light, flaky biscuits.

With sausage and sausage gravy.

This was Youngest Hawthorne's breakfast. I still have breakfast to prepare for Mr. Hawthorne and me. Stay tuned for Rosie's Eggs Hawthorne - my twist on Eggs Benedict.