Family, Food, Health, History, home, Uncategorized

Biscuits And Gravy

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Husband, as a rule, has excellent taste in food. There are  exceptions,  like cornmeal mush, that I won’t touch.  That is traditional to his mother’s family who came from southeastern Ohio.  I don’t understand it. I like polenta,  but the mush his family makes isn’t like that at all. He also likes fried clams. My nonexistent gallbladder, which rebels over fried food, can’t tolerate it.  The main  food disagreement we have is over biscuits and gravy.

He never started eating biscuits and gravy until we moved to North Dakota. Don’t ask me why.  I like biscuits. I like sausage. I just don’t like glutinous, gloppy gravy on top of them. Husband has taken to making it in secret. He says the combination of softness (from the biscuits) and the  spiciness (from the sausage), all held together with the comforting gravy, is too appealing to him to give up. I noticed this week that there were bags of biscuits in the freezer I hadn’t noticed before, and he admitted he had made biscuits and gravy for breakfast, and tossed out the leftovers before I got home.

I think part of this has to do with his diabetes, and his feelings of hunger when he wakes up in the morning.  He says there isn’t really isn’t anything I like that he doesn’t like, but that he finds biscuits and gravy so comforting.  He blames it on the diners and truck stop cafes that he ate in while he worked on the Rez for six years.

What do you eat that your housemates won’t eat? Do you eat anything in secret? What are your comfort foods?

81 thoughts on “Biscuits And Gravy”

    1. Lou likes grits, too. He mailordered an organic bunch, froze them so they did not decompose without all the additives, then forgot about them. The bag broke in the freezer, so he had to clean frozen grits out of the bottom. What a mess.

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  2. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    All I can say is that I understand Chris’ fondness for biscuits and mush. Just not the gravy part. There are several items I love, that I think leave Lou mystified. For example, he is glad to munch on several slices of raw kohlrabi, but he does not share my enthusiasm for kohlrabi every day for months. The same goes for corn meal mush—with butter, honey and bacon. Then the next day, the mush is sliced and fried in butter. I love that. I just don’t eat it anymore because It is just too many calories. This is all “Grandma Food”—stuff Grandma used to fix for us. Neither does Lou share the entire family’s enthusiasm for tapioca fruit salad either—for the holiday meal, then for breakfast the next morning. And he says the Wild Plum Pudding just leaves him cold.

    Clearly there are emotional components to each of these dishes.

    I can’t say that I eat in secret, but I find that carefully rationed peanut butter cups satiate my sweet tooth. However, if I don’t hide the bag, someone else in the house Eats. Them. All. Without. Replacing. Them. Not that this is a marital issue. So I hide my bag and he has to buy his own supply.

    So if I just told my secrets to the Baboons and the Online World, are they still my secrets?

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  5. Don’t know that I’ve ever had cornmeal mush, but I have had polenta, and I like it, but I don’t make it since Hans won’t eat it. He also doesn’t like corn tortillas, and I love them. Pickled herring, most kinds of fish, including sushi, I love them all, he stays clear of them, although he recently relented and ate some smoked salmon. That figures, if he’s going to take a liking to fish, it’s going to be one of the most expensive ones.

    I love aged cheeses, cheeses with bold flavors. I love blue cheeses such as Gorgonzola, Roquefort, Stilton and, of course, Danish blue, and I don’t need to hide them, Hans won’t touch them. Give me a baguette, an assortment of cheeses, some radishes, sliced cucumbers, and grapes, and nice bottle of Cabernet and I’m in my happy place.

    I don’t eat in secret. Not even sure I understand the concept. Why would I do that? I do hide bags of salty black licorice, though. If I don’t, Hans gobbles them all up at once, and it’s not good for his blood pressure. I can eat one or two pieces and have had my fill, he’s not satisfied till the bag is empty.

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      1. Has he ever tried the Danish licorice called Piratos? Most Americans spit it out, they think it’s too strong.

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  6. Since I do most of the cooking and planning (such as it is) and provisioning, most of the things we eat are things I like to eat, limited by those things Robin doesn’t like, which is relatively little. The only thing I can think of offhand that I would make more often if Robin liked it better are a couple of rice noodle dishes, chow mei fun being one and the other a more Korean-influenced one. Otherwise we are mostly simpatico
    .
    Robin sometimes will try out some gluten-free recipe, though she has no physical reason to avoid gluten. Invariably those products have a weird texture and are largely unsatisfying. It’s not that I won’t eat them, it’s just that they aren’t worth the calories.

    We don’t really do fried food in our house other than bacon and eggs and stir fry. Certainly not deep fried anything. Once in a while, when I am grocery shopping, I will buy a piece of fried chicken from the deli and eat it in the car in the parking lot. Not really a secret, but I’ve never volunteered that fact either.

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    1. Like Hans when he went to Costco (pre-pandemic), invariably he’d have a slice of pizza. I’d know about it, though, because come dinner time, his usually voracious appetite would fail him. He never really tried to hide it, but as you say, also didn’t volunteer the information. Had I known in advance, I could have cooked just a little less than I normally would.

      What kinds of gluten free ingredients are you talking about, Bill? I’ve tried some of the gluten free pastas (for the benefit of a friend who has Celiac disease), and I find them quite good.

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      1. I was talking mostly about baked goods made from alternative flours. I have tried gluten free pastas (brown rice, etc.), and found them unforgiving in terms of cook time—they go from too firm to mushy very quickly—and even when optimal, they just don’t have the satisfying resilience of durham wheat. They would be OK if you didn’t have any alternative.

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        1. Yes, cook time is crucial, I agree. We’re lucky, neither of us are gluten intolerant or have allergies of any kind, so we really don’t have any dietary restrictions. But more and more, I find that friends have all kinds of issues that I need to take into consideration when cooking for them. Not lately, obviously, haven’t dined with friends since beginning of March.

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  7. I have a superb system for avoiding stuff I shouldn’t eat. I never buy it. If it isn’t in my kitchen, I cannot have a lapse of will power and eat it. But if you flip that line of logic, you end with the notion that if something is in my kitchen I’m gonna eat it. A big bag of red Twizzlers? I’m gonna eat it. A pint of Ben & Jerry’s? I’m gonna eat it. So I don’t buy that stuff.

    I’m proud of having the discipline to not buy snacks. For example, it’s been years since I bought potato chips of any sort. That’s because any potato chip in my house has a life expectancy of a few minutes, like two or three minutes. I never buy snacks, and I’m proud of that. I’m less proud of the ways I find to snack on healthy food. Soup is healthy food. Tossed salad is healthy food. Soup and salad are better with croutons, so I buy croutons. I am probably the only person on this site who eats croutons right out of the package.They’re almost as good as potato chips.

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    1. It probably helps that Molly is doing your grocery shopping, too. You’re not as prone to giving in to spontaneously buying something that looks good to you when you’re shopping from a list.

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  9. Hiding food is, in my mind, for one of three reasons – some mentioned above:
    – it’s mine and I want it to be there when I want it.
    – I feel guilty for eating too much of this, so let’s just not look at it till I’m ready to eat it.
    – someone else will disapprove of me if I have/eat it (probably because I’ve already stated that I’m not eating that anymore…) – this is sometimes irrational.

    Husband sounds a lot like PJ’s Hans – not much fish, esp. my favorite – smoked (trout, whitefish…); no smelly cheeses; and he doesn’t like polenta, )but I don’t often use that, as I haven’t learned how to do it well).

    My comfort foods include all my egg bakes, and custards, which I’ve no doubt detailed here before.

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  12. I married a man who cannot tolerate onions, bell peppers, most dairy, or anything spicy. I love him, but re-learning how to cook without onions or dairy was a challenge. There are a few things that I can sub out things (e.g., in some recipes I can sub out sour cream, which he cannot have, for plain yogurt, which is okay in small amounts), but some things just plain old went off the menu. The running joke has been if I want spicy food I go out with friends. Ordering take out Chinese food also allows me to get spicy and oniony and he can get something without (we have found a place that is good about omitting onions for him). Soft cheeses, aromatic cheeses, really any cheese is safely mine – Husband can’t eat them and Daughter won’t, so no need to hide or sneak them. Dark chocolate on the other hand… I don’t really hide it, but have established that if it is in a certain spot in the kitchen it is mine and not to be shared. Ice cream will never be safe so long as Daughter is living at home. I cannot sneak it and she will find it no matter where I put it…

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    1. Our daughter briefly dated a lactose intolerant pharmacist who wanted to eventually settle in Arizona. She ended the relationship early because she hates hot weather and couldn’t imagine a life without dairy.

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      1. A day without dairy is a day without sunshine. (We also now have three different kinds of milk in our refrigerator at any given time: skim for me, whole milk for Daughter, and lactose-free for Husband…)

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    2. Isn’t hiding ice cream pretty much limited to the freezer? You can’t hide it in your dresser drawer with clean underwear, which is where I hide the licorice.

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        1. I’m way past menopause, so no need to store my underwear in the freezer anymore. Besides we rarely have ice cream to hide.

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  13. There are plenty of things that I’m fussy about, mostly having to do with how they feel when I put them in my mouth. But YA and I are pretty compatible. She really is not crazy about coconut, which I adore. She will occasionally try something that has coconut in it or if it’s not overwhelmingly coconut, it doesn’t bother her. Olives on pizza she will eat if she has to but she would prefer not, which is funny because she loves olives all by themselves. Nonny loves biscuits and gravy, which I have never understood. When you put the gravy on the biscuit, it makes the biscuit mushy. Ish.

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    1. I didn’t like coconut when I was a kid, if it was grated, because I didn’t like the texture. I also really didn’t like it when people put grated carrots in jello. As an adult, I got over the aversion to coconut. I still think carrots and jello is a weird combination, but I if I were offered some at a picnic or something, I wouldn’t turn it down.

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  14. I’ve suffered frequently because my disgust for cheese is difficult to convey to others. When I once had to eat a pizza, I went on an on about my preferences when the waiter took my order. He eventually delivered a pizza “without much cheese on it.” When I refused it, I wondered why my insistence on NO cheese had become a pizza without much cheese. “I thought you were kidding,” he said. Sigh.

    Now I go with one of two stories. I sometimes tell people I belong to a religion that has a strict code against all cheese. Or might I say I am allergic to cheese. The staff in this senior citizen community knows me as the guy with the weird cheese allergy. It works.

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  16. Making spinach cheese pie today with spinach and shallots from the garden, and feta cheese, eggs, ricotta, and parmesan. I can’t do feta raw, but I like it in this pie.

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    2. My best friend doesn’t like strong cheese or blue cheeses at all. She calls feta “fetid” cheese, and says she won’t eat blue cheeses because she doesn’t like to eat mold.

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  17. I’m making grilled pork kebabs with a lime, cilantro, fennel and cumin marinade, grilled potatoes, steamed broccoli, and a caprese salad. A lot of food but the leftovers will be worthy.

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        1. We just had chicken miso soup with soba noodles, mushrooms and kale, and a BLT sandwich made with fresh stirato from farmer’s market and fresh lettuce from the garden. Quick, easy, and very satisfying. No leftovers.

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        2. No cooking for us this weekend. We have lots of leftovers in the fridge from this past week – instant pot mac & cheese, monkey bread, chilequila frittata, vegetarian gravy for a vegetarian poutine.

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        3. I know poutine is a thing, but I’ll have to admit, I’ve never tried it. The concept of putting gravy on French fries just doesn’t sound appealing to me. What am I missing?

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        5. If you just make it and then eat it right away the gravy doesn’t make the french fries mushy. And of course there’s cheese curds underneath all that. Hard to mess up cheese curds.

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        6. We stopped at one of the county fair food vendor stands who has set up in the mall parking lot. There was a steady crowd coming there. Not a line of more than 1 or 2, but it was constant. We had original and garlic cheese curds. And they were wonderful.

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  21. my food is potato’s
    potato chips call out to me
    aldi is my new go to for chips

    aldi is ok on onions potato and apples all are common along with grapes for snacks

    peanut butter and celery or pb and apple are my healthy snacks in lieu of chips

    i buy popcorn in 50# bags
    popcorn 1 1/2 cups in 3/4 cups of canola or peanut oil

    fills two big bowls and we split a stick of butter between two bowls toss in 1/2 cup of parmesan cheese and a tablespoon of sugar

    that’s snack now and munchies as you walk by for an additional day or at least a half a day

    i make a lot of beans and bean related stuff

    crossover with beans potato’s rice tomato spices and onions olives new pea version of protein substitutes are very nice

    sourdough is part of my daily life now with flour if spelt (white or brown are wonderful but heavier th and king arthur white that my don used for his
    he is a purist i mix it up a lot
    brown and white rice are not in the sourdough rotation but almond garbanzo coconut a ever widening array of efforts come up with bread i look forward to but no one else ever touches my cooking
    not true potato’s done plain and popcorn get eaten
    i laugh and comment how much i like and appreciated my own cooking coming. good thing because i’m it for an audience asparagus broccoli caluflower lettuce with a little sautéed and sauce is good
    eat in secret ( bags of chips do a disappearing act so it’s kind of like hiding because i don’t ever share)

    i remember my munchie phase with a bong a dr pepper a bag of pretzels pecan sandies and chocolate and perry mason
    many times 2 dr peppers

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    1. They have small new potatoes at the farmer’s market at the moment, plus, of course, every herb under the sun. If you’re not eating well at the moment, you’re doing something wrong.

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  22. OT: YouTube guide. As far as I can tell, I’m the only Baboon with an active interest in cars. Perhaps some frequent visitors to this site share that interest. Today’s YouTube guide will be about cars.

    YouTube publishes reviews from all sorts of reviewers, with no concern for bias. If you own a Buick dealership you can start pumping out videos that make Buicks look great, and YouTube will publish them if viewers click on them. That makes it critical that viewers of car videos consider the biases—especially the unacknowledged biases—of car video journalists.

    The best YouTube channel for all sorts of car talk is Consumer Report’s Talking Cars. Talking Cars discusses car ownership and maintenance issues while also covering car purchases. While most car channels are about the allure of high performance cars, CR grinds out intelligent coverage of less glamorous issues such as safety equipment and choosing tires. This channel is largely driven by viewer interest, devoting half of its coverage to topics raised by viewers. Consumer Reports is famously independent, refusing to take car ads in its magazine. That lack of bias is precious in a field where journalism is deeply tainted by bribes to encourage favorable car reviews.

    An excellent, if idiosyncratic, car site is produced by a balding fellow named Mark Swain. The channel is called Savagegeese (for reasons never explained). Savagegeese is the ultimate thinking man’s car channel. Swain talks to car designers to understand their thinking. Unlike any other site, his reviews involve getting under cars on lifts to study the engineering that other sites ignore. He’s smart and snarky. Savagegeese is my favorite car site.

    The good folks at Edmunds are not half as interesting, yet they excel at discussing reviewing cars and offering a solid car channel that is useful to anyone, especially anyone considering a car purchase. Similarly, the Kelley Blue Book car site is reliable and worth viewing.

    A man who truly needs no introduction—Jay Leno—is a car lover with a nice site. Growing up in California, Jay’s fascination with cars has led him to amass one of the best car collections in the world. His enthusiasm for all kinds of cars is infectious.

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    1. I will admit that having joined the cult of the electric vehicle, the internal combustion engine does not hold the allure it once did. I love the look of old cars (like the early 70s Cadillac convertible that crossed my path yesterday or the snippet of the Jag in the Leno video above), but driving one, meh. I like the quiet of my EV – pickup on it is nice, too, since I don’t have to rely a transmission to go faster.

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    4. The Jay Leno video reminded me of my two late friends, Jon Ketokoski and Mike Mikkelsen. Both were car enthusiasts, but in very different ways.

      Mike was an artist, a messy creative soul, who from a very early age (13) bought and restored old cars. I don’t know how many he had over the years, but I can recall at least ten. His favorite, a car he acquired when he was seventeen, still in his possession when he died, and now passed on to his youngest son, was a 1941 Dodge Luxury Liner convertible. Mike loved that car. He installed Cadillac seats and a Jaguar motor in it, and like Leno, he loved the sound it made at full throttle. I’ve ridden in it several times, though I was not as enthusiastic about the sound of it as he was. The Dodge had a place of honor at his memorial service, and his ashes were taken for a spin in it. Here’s a photo of Mike’s Dodge:
      https://www.google.com/search?q=1941+dodge+luxury+liner+convertible&client=firefox-b-1-d&sxsrf=ALeKk025VpCuZq-UvnQhZt5Cj4ptIYi6bQ:1593376962852&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=QNrd7NWkl_PeYM%252CKzPYky4HjAxQqM%252C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kQqqztNYfJBYTs-4FnS8EUhL6RCuw&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwizrfTer6XqAhVLbc0KHeGhAOkQ9QEwCXoECAkQHQ&biw=1430&bih=684#imgrc=QNrd7NWkl_PeYM

      Jon’s enthusiasm for old cars was more as a spectator. He always drove new cars, which he maintained meticulously, and traded in every other year for a new one. His last car, a Toyota Avalon, is now in husband’s possession. Jon had a bunch of friends, some of whom he had gone to high school with, who loved and restored old cars. They’d go to the annual street rods and classic car show at the MN State Fairgrounds, and they’d travel together to attend car shows in other parts of the country as well. One of these friends lives in LA, and through his interest in old cars knows Jay Leno, who on one of their visits to LA invited them all to see his collection of cars, a tour he personally conducted.

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      1. I chatted on FB this afternoon with Randy, Mike’s oldest son, in response to an old photo he had posted of Mike. Another of Mike’s friends, Will, who neither Randy nor I knew, chimed in. Here’s a video he posted on YouTube this evening, along with the history of the Dodge:
        “Mike Mikkelsen and his 1941 Dodge Luxury Liner salute. Mike bought the car used in Connecticut as a 17-year old and drove it back to his Montana home. It got left behind when he went to the Korean War and ended up in a coulee rotting on a neighbor’s ranch. It spent more than two decades before he hauled it out and restored it. Mike and his wife Anne Cutter Mikkelsen wrote about the journey Mike and the car took, and Mike’s battle with Parkinson’s disease, in “The Dodge: Guts, Glory and Living Full Throttle.
        Also featured are many of the vehicles Mike owned and restored over the years.”

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  24. I live alone and don’t have to hide anything from anyone. I don’t hide things from myself either…does that work? If I have Pepperidge Farm Fudge Brownie Goldfish cookies in the house I always know where they are, and they are likely to disappear pretty fast.

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    1. Do you mean to tell me, Linda, that you’ve never bought a present early, hid it away in safe place, and then when it came time to retrieve it couldn’t remember where that safe place was? I know I’ve done that more than once.

      Grilled Juicy-Lucies, served on a bun with garlic sauce, avocado, red onion, lettuce and tomato and with potato salad and cucumber salad on the side. Got the grilling done just in time; rain, thunder and lightning ensued promptly after we sat down to eat.

      Hans has spent the weekend installing a new faucet for my bathtub. Our house is a mess, but the tub has never been cleaner, and for the first time in eleven years, I’ll be able to use the hand-held shower thingy that mixes hot and cold water. Jubilation!

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      1. It’s a family joke at our house that we will have forgotten at least one christmas present. Hidden and forgotten about for a week or two. Or until someone says they hoped they’d get a “thingy” for Christmas and it will be “OH!” I did! Where….

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  25. Pingback: Lifestyle/Food: Biscuits And Gravy — Trail Baboon - THE URBAN FISHING POLE: CIGAR BLOGGER

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