Sherlock Holmes on the Case

This past Sunday Mr. Right and I were responsible for bringing snacks to Bible study. There are some ladies (or possibly gentleman) in that class that can really cook. Others are parents of small children, so they go to the store and buy a yummy, calorie filled snack for everyone to enjoy. I don’t have the cooking prowis to make some sort of casserole, nor do I have enough money to buy breakfast at the grocery store.

I decided to keep it simple – homemade biscuits (that I’ve been making since elementary school 4-H) and sausage (that I bought on sale/with coupon even though Mr. Right and I aren’t breakfast eaters). Saturday evening, after getting home from shopping, I started on the biscuits.

The dough was gorgeous – I had added the perfect amout of flour, lard, and buttermilk to make the perfect biscuits. I even considered taking a picture of them, to brag on my blog about how sometimes I could cook well.

I called my mom to ask about baking temp/time, and mocked my sister for not being able to do such an easy task. (Please keep in mind that my sister is a kick “a” cook. I am in awe of her cooking skills, so it amazes me that she can’t do something as basic as a biscuit).

After 15 minutes the top and bottom of each biscuit was brown, but the middle wasn’t done yet. No amount of leaving them in the oven would change that. I took a test bite and it wasn’t soft and fluffy like it should have been. It was edible, and I didn’t have the money in the budget for a plan “b” so I put the sausage between the biscuits and hoped no one would know I made them.

Sunday morning, I got there early. Unfortunately the teacher (also the pastor’s wife) and a few of my classmates were already there. Ginger, possible the sweetest woman on the planet, commented on the fact that the biscuits were homemade. My teacher was amazed “a newly-wed and you’re already making homemade biscuits – I still don’t after 30 years!”

I tried to let them know they didn’t turn out properly – lest they think I was stupid enough to mistake that for a good biscuit. A couple minutes later, a guy in the class scarfed down two sausage biscuits and commented on how good they were. Apparently he’s lived a deprived life.

Mr. Right loved them as well. After class he ate 3 sausage biscuits and 1 plain biscuit. I took them to my parents house (we always spend Sunday afternoon there) and asked my mom what could have gone wrong. She took one bite then spit it in the trash can.

“You didn’t use self-rising flour did you?”

“Um…I don’t know.”

“Well I do. You didn’t.”

“Crap. Could that have been what happened to the cookies too?”

Apparently it was. Because my mother said that with that cookie recipe she always has a problem with the cookies getting to thick to be done all the way through. So it was curious when my cookies flattened instead of rising.
Turns out, I’m not a horrible cook. I just can’t read a bag properly.