Joy the Baker

I’ll be the first to admit, that I’ve been breakfast obsessed lately.  I fall asleep thinking about the breakfast.  I wake up thinking I better hurry to the kitchen to get breakfast and tea started.  I eat breakfast standing in front of my kitchen window watching my morning get brighter and brighter with the sun and listening the the morning’s news on the radio.  It’s a ritual I’ve become attached to.  Oatmeal is my no fail breakfast treat, and I’ve had pecans on the brain lately.  This buttered pecan oatmeal is rich, earthy and filling. The warm, sweet and nutty combination would be great with fruit too- any fruit- bananas, apples, peaches, berries.  It’s the kind of breakfast my dreams are made of.

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These Pecan Sour Cream Biscuits take me back home.  I come from a biscuit loving family.  We take our biscuits rather seriously.  My Dad makes what he calls Mile High Biscuits.  They’re light and buttery, a beautiful golden color, and we always ate them hot with dinner.  We were generally a happy family of 4 sitting around the dinner table, sharing a meal, laughing, and talking about our days.  Biscuit night was always a different story. On biscuit nights, there was, without a doubt, scandal and conflict.

Why?  Well Dad always made a recipe of 12 biscuits.  Now let’s do the math- 12 biscuits for 4 people, that’s 3 each.  The problem is, no one never ended up with three biscuits.  Three words- my little sister.  My sister, the biscuit strategist, would cunningly place the biscuit basket at her side of the table, and with great stealth, gather about 8 biscuits for herself over the course of dinner.  I must admit, the girl is clever.  And with her darling smile and endless charm, she always got away with the lion’s share of biscuits. Always!  I’d stomp my feet, outraged, pleading “But Mom…!  It’s not fair!”  Mom would calmly reply “Joy, who said life was fair?  Now eat your broccoli before it gets cold.”At that point, defeated, I usually just ate my one biscuit slowly, while trying to shoot my sister down with the evil eye.  Mom was right though- life isn’t always fair, sometimes your sister just gets more biscuits than you, and steamed broccoli once it’s cold, is just wretched.

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