Peppery Creamed Chicken & Cheese Biscuits

This morning I was hungry for sausage gravy and biscuits. After rooting around in the kitchen I found no sausage… BUT I did find chicken. Okay, I will make chicken gravy and biscuits, probably healthier anyway. As always my disclaimer is this: Feel free to substitute to make it your own.

Peppery Chicken Gravy

2 frozen chicken breasts or 4 chicken tenderloins

8 oz carton of fresh mushrooms

1 bunch green onion tops

2 cloves garlic

2 jalapeno peppers (chopped)

1 banana pepper (chopped)

½ cup flour

3 cups milk

Spices or chicken bouillon (I used Tony Chachere’s Cajun Seasoning)

Salt and pepper

In a Dutch oven, place chicken, enough to water to cover chicken by 2 inches (about 6-8 cups). Add spices or chicken bouillon and peppers. Cook/simmer down to half, remove the chicken and chop it and then add everything else except the flour, milk, salt and pepper.

Once all ingredients are cooked and pot is simmering at a slow boil, mix flour, milk, salt and pepper until this is smooth. Mix slowly into the chicken broth and continue to stir until it thickens.

Serve over biscuits.

The biscuits do not have to be cheese biscuits.You can use ready to bake biscuits from the refrigerated section of the grocery store, you can use dry biscuit mix from the baking aisle of the grocery store or you can make your own cheese biscuits which is truly not as hard as it sounds.

Cheese Drop Biscuits

2 cups flour

3 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

½ cup shortening

1 cup grated cheese (your choice, I like sharp chedder)

¾ - ½ cup milk

Preheat oven to 450º

Mix dry ingredients together and cut shortening into the dry with a pastry blender or fork until it is a crumbly texture. Mix the shredded cheese into the crumble mix and then stir in milk. Be careful not to over mix, just until the dry ingredients are wet.

Drop by spoonfuls onto a greased cookie sheet and bake for 10-12 minutes or until the tops are golden.

There you have it, a favorite brunch recipe of mine for the weekend. 

Where Canning Begins

So this is where it all begins for next summer and fall. It is really quite simple. You order the seeds, you plant the seeds, you take care of them and watch them grow.

If you want to get away from ordering seeds, you start with a few heirloom seeds and save seed year to year when you find a variety of something that you really like. This is how I remember my grandparents doing it. I remember seeing "wet" seeds spread on newspaper and "dry" seeds in glass baby food jars all lined up on the ledges of the basement windows for the winter.

This year I begin a local collection with the help of some friends who live outside of a small town called Cleveland, Minnesota and family outside of Gibbon, Minnesota. Are you getting the drift that I live in town in a bright and sunny apartment but an apartment nonetheless? This year I ordered 3 types of seed from Seed Savers Exchange <http://read.timesprintingdigital.com/t/26979/8> to start the collection.

Because I love fried green tomatoes, that one was a no brainer when I saw Aunt Ruby's German Green Tomatoes. Then I noticed Amish Paste Tomatoes, yup, I can almost taste the sauce! But here is the seed that brought me to the seed catalog in the first place. Kalman's Hungarian Tomato Pepper! They look unbelievable interesting. Yes folks, other than the fact that I like peppers, I ordered them and want to grow them because they look so cool!

The Tarahumara White Seeded Sunflowers were an added bonus and one of the reasons I love ordering seeds. The seed companies almost always send along complimentary seeds and you never know what you will get, kind of like Forrest Gump's chocolates.

It is going to be an exercise in patience to keep these seeds till it is time to plant them. The way the weather is looking, I am thinking somewhere between the middle of March to the middle of April. I almost always do stuff like this on "gut instinct" and I think this will be no exception.