Last Updated on June 20, 2024 by Michelle
Seventeen years, and three kitchens, ago my mom had a step stool custom made for them. It fit perfectly at the end of our kitchen peninsula, so their eager little hands could reach the dough when they helped me mix cookie batter or make biscuits.
One daughter, who wasn’t even born when that white oak stool was crafted in a Mennonite woodworking shop in Pennsylvania, now crafts something magical in our New England colonial kitchen every day. She hasn’t needed that worn, scratched up stool in over a dozen years, and I even allow her to play with fire these days. Especially when she’s creating a masterpiece of hearth-baked pizza in our beehive oven (or teaching her older sister).
She’s fascinated with perfecting cooking over the open fire.
She also loves the joy of wholesome cooking and pours over research on homesteading, now that we have set down roots on 14 rural acres. Fresh, from-scratch recipes are continually cascading out from under the well-worn, stained cover of her recipe notebook. Oil- and butter-scarred handwritten scrap papers are piled on kitchen shelves and layered in our little junk drawer. Some with recipes, some with cost analysis lists, tracking individual ingredient prices so she knows if she’s saving money with each recipe.
Her favorites are the ones that are delicious, wholesome, and cost effective. These prized recipes are housed in plastic page protectors and filed in her notebook. And she’s counting the days till the chicken coop is repaired and painted this spring, offering ocher-brown treasures every morning–fresh and free.
Although ease of baking is not one of her requirements for her most illustrious cookbook entries (she does, after all, adore spending time in the kitchen), it is a quality that gets my attention. The recipe she has perfected for freezer biscuits takes the cake (and makes you wanna eat it too).
Looking back almost 2 decades, I’m thankful her NaNa gave her sisters that sweet stool… it was a gift that helped one daughter reach her potential, literally, long before she even needed it. And I’m thankful that, by the grace of God, I’ve weathered very messy kitchens, grave experimentation, and oh-so-many piles of chicken-scratched, soiled recipes over the years. It’s never easy–come to think of it, the process called “parenting” is always rather messy– but I’m going to keep encouraging all my daughters to discover what they’re passionate about, provide what they need to reach their goals, and be willing to help them clean up the messes they make along the way. Certainly, it’s a hard journey, but there are many moments to savor on this safari. Delicious tastes on the trek. We might even enjoy easy freezer biscuits and pies on the pilgrimage.
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“Let’s not become weary… for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” (Galatians 6:9)
Makes 25-35 biscuits
- 6 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 tbs. sugar
- 2 tbs. Baking Powder
- 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
- 1 stick of butter, melted
- about 3-4 cups milk
- In a large bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.
- Add melted butter and milk to the flour mixture (mixing with a wooden spoon), until a soft, wet dough forms.
- Push the dough out with your hands, about 3/4″ thick, a little more or a little less depending on how thick you like your biscuits. (Flour is your best friend here! But don’t add so much that the dough becomes firmer–just enough so that you can work with the dough without it sticking to your hands.)
- Cut out as many biscuits as you can, then gather the scraps, kneed them together, and re-push out and re-cut. You can do this as many times as you need to, but the next rollings might not be as good as the previous ones.
- Place the biscuits on a greased cookie sheet, cover them, and place them in the freezer until hard, 2-5 hours. When they’re hard, put them in a large resalable, freezer-safe bag, or an air-tight container and place them back in the freezer until you’re ready to bake them.
To bake biscuits, do not thaw them. Place them, frozen, on a cookie sheet and bake at 425 for 15-20 minutes, flipping them halfway through.
Have you tried baking some when the dough is room temperature instead of frozen? Do you think it would work if I tried that?
Absolutely! Every time I mix these biscuits I bake some right away and freeze the rest. Let me know how they turn out for you!