bacon gravy

So I wake up one morning and decide to make biscuits.

Heck with the fact that I can’t use wheat flour, or anything with gluten in it. I wanted to make biscuits. I had been staring at the photograph and recipe for buttermilk biscuits in The Pioneer Woman Cooks, and I started growing hungry. Danny was napping — he was the one to throw his legs off the bed at 5:30 in that morning (we trade off for the early risings with the toddler) and he lay down when he couldn’t move another step without sleep. I wanted to surprise him with a late breakfast.

I pulled out our trusty kitchen scale to start weighing flours, to convert the recipe on the printed page to one that worked in our kitchen. After I had gathered the little troop of flours close to me, I noticed something awry. The numbers on the scale went topsy-turvy, blurring into indecipherable scratches. Huh? It was busted.

How was I going to make gluten-free biscuits without being able to measure the flours?

I threw flours into the food processor and started cutting butter. I started trusting my instincts. Baking powder, buttermilk, a quick stir and feel how the dough was coming.

Tell you the truth, those biscuits weren’t darned bad. Danny was so happy to see them when he woke up.

But biscuits need bacon. And poached eggs. And if you’re going to have biscuits, bacon, and eggs, you have to have gravy. Right?

In case you might want to wake up one day and make biscuits, and find yourself in need of gravy, here’s a quick bacon gravy recipe, written in anecdotal form:

Make yourself some bacon in a big skillet. Make it crisp.

Pull the bacon out of the grease it has exuded. Put the bacon on some paper towels to drain. Leave the bacon fat in the pan.

Keep the heat on medium-high.

Stir up the bacon fat, then add a few tablespoons of flour (for me and many of us, that’s sweet rice flour or sorghum flour). Stir. Keep adding flour until you have a thick paste, kind of like the one you made in kindergarten.

Whisking quickly, add some kind of stock to the quick roux you have just made. (Pork stock is good here, of course.) Dribble in the stock, then stir, then dribble some more, the stir. Keep doing this, whisking vigorously, until you have gravy of the consistency you want.

That’s it. Pour the gravy on the biscuits and eat.