Biscuit Chicken

One of our family favorites growing up was Bisquick Chicken. I still get a yen for it occasionally but I never keep Bisquick around as it goes bad before I can ever use even the smallest box. Which is fine because I can just whip up a quick substitute. Honestly it makes me wonder just how impatient we have to be to need Bisquick when the slow version is so easy to throw together.

I used the recipe for Homemade Bisquick Mix on food.com and eyeballed the ingredients, roughly as follows:

1/3 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons bacon lard

Ok, the food.com recipe says shortening but bacon lard is a perfect, practically free substitute. Every time you cook bacon, simply pour the grease through a fine strainer into a mason jar and store in your fridge. Keep adding to the jar and using it for all sorts of yumminess.

Back to the mix. Stir the dry ingredients together in a pie plate then mash in the bacon lard (or shortening if you want to be boring) until it has a crumbly texture.

Crack an egg in a large bowl and whisk it a little with a fork. Dredge a chicken breast (with skin and bones) in the egg, then coat thoroughly with the biscuit mix. Put the chicken, skin side up, in a metal pie plate. Dot the chicken with small pats of butter. Bake at 350 for an hour or until the coating is light golden brown and the chicken tests done with a meat thermometer.

I can only eat about 1/3 of a piece of chicken this size, so I see chicken salad in my short term future. And I'm eating my veggies separately because I ran out of room on this plate!

Baked Potato

Please bake them, don't nuke them! Most instructions say to pierce the potato all over with a fork. This is an important, not to be overlooked, instruction. I found this out once when I forgot to poke the potato and heard a loud pow in the kitchen. Yep, the potato exploded all over the inside of the oven.

Piercing is fine to prevent explosions, but an even better method is to insert a metal rod clear through the potato lengthwise. Any steam escapes out around the rod and the metal through the middle ensues that the potato cooks evenly and quicker. 

My mom has a set of stainless steel nails for this purpose. Gram had a nifty device with four nails attached that the potatoes stand up on. I just use my kabob skewers.

An average baking potato should take about an hour to cook this way at 350 degrees.

Grilled or Toasted?

I love, love, love a hot, buttery sandwich with cheese and pretty much any yummy sandwich ingredient combo. I call it a grilled sandwich - as in "grilled cheese" - but my mom grew up calling it a toasted sandwich. Toasted cheese? It just doesn't sound as tasty. But neither is really accurate, is it? I didn't use a grill and Grandma didn't use the toaster.

Whatever you call it, this was an easy, quick taste of summer, with fresh garden herbs and my favorite grocery store tomatoes (since I have a black thumb when it comes to growing tomatoes).

2 thin slices of crusty sourdough bread

1/2 tablespoon butter

1 slice Black Forest ham

Shredded mozzarella

Fresh basil leaves

Campari tomato slices

Dijon mustard

Melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat. When nearly all melted, add the bread and let the pieces soak up the butter on one side. Lay basil leaves on one piece of the bread to cover any holes in the bread and prevent the cheese from seeping out. Add the cheese, then the ham, then the tomato slices. Squeeze a little Dijon on the other slice of bread, then invert that slice onto the sandwich, Dijon side down. Cook the sandwich on both sides until golden brown and crusty. Cut in half on the diagonal and enjoy!