Breakfast, outside, on an early September morning, under the trees, on a flower covered picnic table, surrounded by family was perfect. Just perfect. I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to share it. I wanted to invite our handsome youngest son Kevin, his beautiful wife Kandyce and that awesome grandson of ours to go camping for a weekend with us and we would go out to the state park.
We are lucky enough to have one of Missouri's largest state parks right in our own backyard. It has 17,441 acres, 89 miles of shoreline, two swimming beaches, boat-launching areas, marinas, campgrounds, camper cabins, two yurts, hiking, mountain biking and equestrian trails, tours of Ozark Caverns and this state park even has an airport in it.
Our RV can sleep eight so there is plenty of room. I thought we would invite the kids as well as Krysten, Kandyce’s twin, to go with us if she wanted to. The table makes into a bed, the couch makes into a bed, it has a king size bed for Mike and me and it has a feature I’ve never seen before. It has a queen size bunk bed that lowers down right overtop the driver and passenger seats. When not in use you deflate and remove the air mattress and the whole unit goes right back up to the ceiling and you never know it’s there. There’s even a place to store the ladder. How cool is that?
I had visions of steaks on the grill, evening campfire, s’mores, wine, laughter and love. No mosquitoes! Waking up all sleepy-eyed, tousle-headed and pajama-rumbled to a breakfast of bacon and eggs cooked on the grill. Kevin, of course, was the Grillmaster.
Unfortunately, we had some warranty work done on the RV and we didn’t get it back until it was too late to do any camping. It’s something I’d still like to do but I don’t know if it will ever come to fruition.
Look at that, would ya!
“What’s that Peg?” you ask.
I’m off on a tangent again! Doggone it! What I really wanted to talk about was Cork and Pam’s NuWave.
“What’s a NuWave?” you ask.
I’m getting to that.
Cork cooked the bacon and eggs on the griddle of his gas grill and Pam made the hash brown potatoes on her NuWave.
“That’s one of those induction cookers I saw on the TV,” Mike said to me when Pam carried it out and plugged it in. Then he turned to Pam “How do you like it?” he asked her.
“I love it, I use it all the time,” she told us. “We don’t fry in the RV.”
“What a great idea,” Mike and I both said. And it’s better for the RV too, I’m sure. You know how frying odors can hang around for a long time in your house. When I take the girls out in the evening after I’ve fried something for dinner, I can always tell what it was when I come back in.
The next time Mike saw the infomercial I ended up with not one - but two NuWave Induction Cooktops!
They were offering a deal. By one, get one free! Just pay shipping. And that makes it just about the price per piece that it should have been to begin with. Along with the cooktops Mike bought me two nonstick skillets, (“You can fry an egg without any oil,” he told me, “and it won’t stick!”) and a combination steamer/fondue pot, with eight forks.
I have my very first fondue pot! I didn’t even know I wanted one!
I am not that experienced in the art of fondue. I can honestly say that I have only ever had two experiences with fondue and both of those times were courtesy of … who else? Those wonderful people Cork and Pam.
“Is Cork Mike’s brothers real name?” you may be wondering.
No. Cork’s real name is Charles. Pam calls him Chuck. I tried to call him Chuck because I felt funny calling him by the family nickname that Mike uses but he pulled me aside one day, “You can call me Cork.”
When we had fondue with Cork and Pam we had steak that had been marinated overnight and cut into bite size pieces. You get a piece of steak on your fork and drop it into the hot oil sitting in the middle of the table.
I’ll tell you what. If you need to slow down your eating, that’s the way to do it! One bite of meat every few minutes will definitely slow you down. And I have to tell you that Pam makes the best curry sauce to dip your steak into. To me, that little piece of steak was just the way to get the curry sauce to my mouth. Mmmmm mmm.
So now I have my very first fondue pot and I want to have a Fondue Party. Cooking little pieces of meat in hot oil is too time consuming. A cheese fondue with bread cubes doesn’t sound like much of a party to me and it’s all I can remember from the days when fondue pots were all the rage and advertised on TV. That and chocolate fondue. We are not doing a chocolate fondue.
Maybe something like a Sunday brunch would be better, I thought. Is there such a thing as a breakfast fondue? I started investigating and found a recipe for a fruit fondue that you can ‘serve with pieces of waffle, French toast or pieces of sausage’ it said. I don’t know about dipping sausage into a fruit fondue but the rest of it sounded pretty good to me. I followed the link to the recipe and it looked easy and straightforward. Something I thought I could manage without a practice run.
I start to plan this in my head. I can have the fruit fondue and I could make a big pan of bacon in the oven. Who doesn’t like bacon? I could even have a few sausages too. Wal*Mart sells a ready made sausage patty that I like pretty good and it just gets warmed in the microwave.
At our weekly Golden Corral breakfast with our friend Margaret one Saturday morning I asked if she would be open to coming for a brunch some Sunday morning.
“If I don’t have anything else planned … yes, I’d come,” she said.
Then I started to tell her what I was planning. “…and you can dip pieces of waffle in it,” I told her. “Is there a brand of frozen waffle that’s good?”
“Eggo’s are pretty good,” she said, then paused. “I think I still have a waffle iron you could use.” Margaret doesn’t cook much anymore and it’s been years since she’s made waffles.
In my minds eye I see us preparing a meal together in my kitchen. “Great! You’re in charge of making the waffles!” Margaret’s always good to jump in and help, besides, I’ve never had much luck with waffles.
That’s all the further I got with my Fondue Brunch Fantasy.
Then one day a recipe for a Never Fail Biscuit shows up on my timeline on FaceBook. Biscuits and gravy comes to my mind. I could use my second NuWave to hold a pot of sausage gravy and make biscuits for my brunch - if they are any good, that is.
I’ve never fooled with making biscuits very much. They are too much work and the results are only so-so. You can buy biscuits in a can but then that’s what you get. Canned biscuits. And really, they are good enough, just not all that special and I prefer a fried potato over that any day.
I followed the link to the recipe and checked it out. It has only two ingredients. Self rising flour and heavy whipping cream. How easy is that!
If I am going to make it for brunch, I thought, I’d better try it out first. I bought a pint of heavy whipping cream and whipped up a batch. Easy breezy-lemon squeezy!
I’ll tell you what, these little boogers are good! And just the right texture to support gravy. And equally as good with some butter and even all by themselves!
“Give it to us Peg,” I hear you.
So the recipe is equal parts -by weight- of self rising flour and heavy whipping cream. That’s it. Oh, and you can add a little salt if you want to but I hardly ever do. (I’ll pass on the complete instructions to anyone who asks for it.)
The first batch didn’t last long with me getting one every time I thought about them (or walked past the kitchen counter and saw them laying there). So I made a second batch. I didn’t really want to because I seemed helpless to stop myself from snacking on them all day long but I couldn’t just throw the rest of the heavy cream out. I had to make a second batch.
Lucky for me that Kevin and Kandyce stopped by that evening and I was able to unload most of that second batch on them.
“Are you going to try one?” I asked as I handed the bag of still warm biscuits to Kandyce.
“I am hungry,” she said. “And we haven’t had supper yet.”
Kandyce mmmmm’ed as she ate her first bite and I smiled.
Kevin and Mike were talking between themselves. “Give me a bite of that,” Kevin said just as Kandyce popped the last little bite into her mouth. She opened the bag and held it out for Kevin.
“Still warm,” he said as he reached in for one. Then he bit into it. “Mmmm,” he said, “these have a really good flavor.” He sounded surprised.
“I know right! And they are so easy to make too!”
Two batches of Never Fail Biscuits down and there was still some heavy cream left, just not enough to make more biscuits, thank goodness.
“Throw it away,” you say?
I hate to throw away things that are perfectly good!
“Buy more cream and make more biscuits.”
No! I can’t stop eating them so one batch at a time is enough! If I bought more cream that would mean two or three more batches I’d have to make before the cream goes bad-and I don’t know the shelf life of cream. Seven days?
“Just put it in your coffee Peggy,” I heard my mother say in my mind’s eye. She is so practical! Had it been her, she would have done exactly that because she uses cream in her coffee, but I gave up milk in my coffee years ago.
“Then throw it out,” Momma says exasperated. Nothing like offering up a solution to a problem and being shot down now is there?
No! I can’t bear to!
So I capitulated and put cream in my next cup of coffee…and my next…and as the day wore on my tummy starts to hurt. Another cup of coffee and I’m dumping in the last of the cream when I realize that it might be the cream causing my tummy to hurt. Since I gave up milk years ago, I no longer have the enzyme that breaks down the lactose in milk.
Again, let me say that I hate to throw things away that are good. Don’t laugh, but I drank it anyway. Halfway through that cup of coffee my tummy starts to hurt again. This is silly, and I got up from my desk and dumped the last of my coffee. And my tummy stopped hurting.
What a conundrum! How was I to make just one batch of biscuits and not have all that cream left over that I feel like I gotta use?
Make it with regular milk?
“Won’t work Peg,” you say.
Yeah, well I know that now. The biscuits didn’t go to waste but they weren’t as good. The texture and flavor was different.
I know it probably has something to do with fat, because that’s the difference between milk and cream. Could I add fat to it? I was letting it rattle around in my head as I went about my day.
That night, on my daily phone call to my beautiful mother, my problem came to mind.
“Momma, is there substitution for heavy cream?” She had told me the substitution for buttermilk years ago and I thought there was a chance she might know the substitution for heavy cream too.
She cleared her throat as she searched her mind. “Let me just check the Joy Of Cooking and get back with you on that,” she said. Heavy cream was a luxury not often afforded when you are raising eleven kids, so making things that called for heavy cream were not on her menu. However, as it turns out, there is a substitution for heavy cream.
“Three quarters cup milk and one third cup butter,” Momma told me, “will yield one cup of heavy whipping cream.
Isn’t she awesome!
Now I could make just enough heavy cream for one batch of biscuits! What kind of difference will it make in the biscuits? I had to try it.
The next day I set about making biscuits. I reached for the butter and realized I should have thought about getting it out of the fridge long before I was ready to use it. Could I melt it and whisk it into the milk? I wondered. What would Momma say? I could call her but I know what she’d say.
“Use soft butter.”
I have been told so many times that something won’t work only to try it for myself and find out it does work. I know my Momma Voice was probably right in this case but I decided to give it a try anyway. It was either that or wait until the butter softened and doggone it! I was ready to make biscuits! Maybe I can whisk it fast enough to incorporate it.
I slowly poured the melted butter into the cold milk and whisked as fast as I could. Things started out looking pretty good. Encouraged, I poured the rest of the butter in. Then the butter started to gather and clump inside my whisk. Dumass, I called myself and knocked it out, added the flour and mixed it all together. The biscuits actually didn’t turn out too bad. Maybe it would work better if I warmed the milk too. I was letting that rattle around in my head as I went about my day. Stuff is always rattling around in my head, don’t you know.
So I had to make biscuits one more time using soft butter. The biscuits turned out perfect. They were just as good as using heavy whipping cream and the soft butter mixed into the flour just fine so why bother melting it?
That night, on my I Love You call, I decided to pit the Momma Voice in my head against the Momma Voice on the phone. I was just sure of what she would tell me and we could have a good laugh.
“Momma, when you make your own heavy cream would you melt the butter or just have it soft?” I would ask.
“Use soft butter,” she would say.
“Well guess what I did?” I would say.
She would be quiet for a moment as she thought about it. “Melted the butter?” she would venture a guess.
I’d smile at her wisdom as I say, “Yep.”
“Peggy!” she would exclaim in that exasperated tone of voice I heard many times while growing up. Not mean though, but definitely with an air of amusement. Even when my mother was mean to us as kids, it was always tempered with love.
And then we would have a good laugh about it.
That’s how the conversation went in my head. In reality it went like this. “Momma, when you make your own heavy cream would you melt the butter or just have it soft?” In my mind’s eye I was gloating in anticipation of victory. In fact, I was so sure that I would have bet you a hundred dollars on what she would say.
“I believe I’d melt it,” she said.
I was flabbergasted but tried not to show it. I didn’t want her to know that I had already tried it and it was not the right thing to do.
I am my mother’s daughter after all.
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