For dinner tonight, I cooked up a batch of biscuits and gravy.

This isn’t your weak Cracker Barrel white gravy. Nope, it’s chock full of tasty pork sausage!!!!

Pork, the other white meat.

Here’s how you do it:

You start off with your basic ingredients: sausage, four, milk, salt and pepper.

A word of advice about the sausage: buy the cheapest brand they have. What you are going for here is grease. Lots and lots of grease. If you go buy a package or premium Jimmy Dean, you aren’t going to get enough grease.

Now, I don’t know how to make this stuff per a recipe. My mom and mother in law taught me how to make it when I used to help out at my old church when we fed the hungry on Sunday mornings. That was on a much larger scale (30 to 40) people. Mostly, it’s just a matter of feel.

I like to cook using the least amount of dishes and pans, so I tend to cook this in one deep pot.

Plop the piggy bits and pieces into the pan and brown the snot out of them. Add a little salt and a bunch of black pepper at this stage.

Once the sausage got to cooking, devil dog showed up hoping for a bite to eat. Fat chance girl.

Once your sausage is all cooked, turn the heat way down and just let all the juices start flowing. Remember, you are going for grease.

Once you’ve been sufficiently greased up, add in the flour.

This is one of the trickier parts. If you put in too much flour, your gravy will taste like…well…flour. If you don’t put enough in, it will not thicken up like it needs to. I ended up putting in 6 heaping tablespoons of flour. In retrospect, I should have only put in 4.

Now, here is where people mess up. They stir in the flour then immediately add the milk. You’re going to want your roux to sit and cook for awhile.

After your roux has cooked for a little bit, it’s time to add the milk. This is the second most difficult thing to do. If you add too much, you have to add in flour, which is a pain in the butt. If you don’t add enough, you have to add more milk and wait to boil again.

I tend to error on the side of not enough milk.

I added in a few cups of milk.

Turn the heat down and stir occasionally to prevent scorching the bottom.

You will need to bring it to a boil for the stuff in the flour to do its trick. Once it boils, you will start to see it thicken up. If it gets too thick, add in some more milk and bring back to a boil. If it is too runny, you will need to mix some flour in water to make a paste, then add the past back to the pot.

Mine thickened up just right, but I still feel I used too much flour. Oh well. Live and learn.

Also, don’t forget to cook the biscuits.

It was wonderfully good eats.

After dinner I went on a 6 mile bike ride in an attempt to burn off the calories.

It was odd, everywhere I went, there was a faint smell of sausage in the air.