 Hey y'all. Good morning. It's Tammy with Colored Belly Cooks. I'm so hungry this morning. So I decided I would make some biscuits and gravy and slice up some cantaloupe and I'm going to get started. Today I'm going to do something easy and use my favorite biscuit mix. This is Southern Biscuit Mix Formula L. I usually put in a scoop for every person about a third cup. There's quite a few of us here so I'll do five. With biscuit mix you don't have to measure. You just put in a scoop per person and then you add your buttermilk. You add your buttermilk a little bit at a time until all the mix, you don't have any flour left, clean to the bone. It is in a red and white bag. It's called Southern Biscuit Mix and it's only in the south. It's way better than biscuit. It's really like a homemade biscuit. Southeastern Mills makes a pretty good one too if you can find their biscuit mix. Yours is usually a little pouches. Today I'm going to make big biscuits because we're going to have biscuits and gravy as well. And with any biscuit mix you're just going to put your flour out on the counter and knead it about seven or eight times. Take a little shortening and put it in my panion. These are huge biscuits. This is a Pemper Chef biscuit cutter. I'm talking quietly because it's morning and I don't want to wake everybody up. These are huge. One biscuit would be enough per person as big as these are. A little bit more short than my finger. One last biscuit. I'll just roll it. It's huge. Some big old biscuits. And I'm not going to pat them today with buttermilk. I'm going to get these in the oven at 450 degrees for 20 minutes. Okay when I eat biscuits and gravy I love to have cantaloupe. And right now cantaloupes are coming into season and they're really good and sweet so we are going to slice up a cantaloupe. Get me somebody to put the seeds in. Scrape it. Here we find a good cantaloupe. Save the seeds and let them dry. Plant them the next year. We just take our knife and go along the grind. Watch out. Don't get your fingers at the end. Or you can turn it around and make it pretty. There's our cantaloupe for breakfast. Now all we're going to do is step over here and make some gravy. Okay so when I was growing up mama always made Crisco gravy which is shortening. This is the kind of shortening that most of the sunders buy down here. It's a little more expensive than the store brand but it is good. So you're always going to use one part shortening to flour and I've already used a third cup of flour in my sifter right here. So today I'm making a pretty big batch of gravy. So I'm going to use a third cup of shortening. And while that melts I'm going to get some milk out. We're going to use milk to make our gravy. Mama made milk gravy. And this is 2% milk. Let's see how much I got left. Now I do have a recipe in my recipe book. You can add butter to your gravy and it's really good. I'm not going to do that today but you can always do that. Now you're going to want your eye to be on a pretty high level. It's great to have a gravy whisk. If you don't have a gravy whisk use a regular whisk but try to use a whisk and not a spoon when you make a good gravy. Alright now we're going to take our flour that's in our sifter and we're going to sift about a third cup of flour into that third cup of shortening. We go ahead and add some pepper. I'm going to add about a whole teaspoon and salt. Now we're going to mix the two up and if you get the consistency right it should just be kind of puffy like you see right now. Now you would never want to make gravy until this is brown. So you're going to let this sit here in brown until it's nice and toasty and that cooks the flour and it gets rid of the raw taste of the flour and it just makes a delicious gravy. Now if you just got to have bacon grease or butter go ahead and use it and just substitute it for the shortening. And I do have a little bacon grease over here that I have saved but I don't use bacon grease a lot to cook with like a lot of people do just because mom made it and so I don't really like the taste quite as much and once it starts to brown it'll get brown pretty quick but you really need to let it get toasty before you add your milk. Alright now once it starts getting brown like that that's when you add your milk. When it's done I'm just going to pour it right back in this measuring cup. So now is when you take your whisk and you really whisk it along the bottom so that your gravy doesn't turn out lumpy and once it heats up it'll thicken really fast. Now it's starting to thicken it looks really good. So I'm going to back y'all up and let y'all watch me pour it. This is soft butter and this is Pluchera I believe is the name of it is really good French butter big biscuits. Now my biscuit cutter set that I have on my website you can go to my website and get anything you see me cooking with but it also has a really large one with it. So there's really no need to have it and the pampered chef one because if you get the set you get all the sizes in one. I just don't have it right here with me because Chris had to get it from the house. We're still in the process of finalizing our move to some berries. Alright we're going to make us a plate. Alright I'm going to make a plate. Cantaloupe is really good with biscuits and gravy because the salt and the gravy pairing with the sweet of the cantaloupe is just delicious. Alright let's get a bite. That really hits my spot. Thanks for watching Colored Belly Cooks where we cook like mama did. Bye I love you.