Everyone in my family has a special dish that we share whenever we visit each other. For instance, at Thanksgiving you’ll find my uncle Richard standing by the blender whirring up batches of his classic salsa. At Christmas, my Uncle Austin can be found handing out bags of his addictive granola. If you’re celebrating a birthday, then chances are my grandma is baking you a chocolate pie. And me? My specialty is biscuits.
While I’ve made biscuits since I was a teenager, it wasn’t until a visit to my grandparents almost 10 years ago that my grandma decided I would become chief biscuit maker of the family. I was there to help out with my grandpa, who had been ill. Because she’d been busy taking care of him, my grandma hadn’t had the time to devote to making biscuits from scratch and was using canned ones instead. On that trip, when I presented them with a skillet of warm homemade biscuits straight from the oven it was a most welcome gift. And I’ve been on biscuit duty ever since.
Biscuits are not hard to make, as it’s just stirring together a few ingredients and then rolling and cutting a dough. They take little time to assemble, and you can go from mixing dry ingredients to eating a hot biscuit in about half an hour or so. Even the most impatient can usually wait that long for something delicious and homemade.
The best thing about baking biscuits, however, is how meditative the process can be. Because they’re easy to make, you don’t have to think very hard as you stir the ingredients and manipulate the dough. The most difficult task is waiting 15 minutes for the biscuits to come out of the oven. No matter how I’m feeling, the simple yet satisfying act of making biscuits always brings me peace and joy.
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