Biscuits & Gravy Casserole

I am a Southern girl who likes her comfort food.   The trouble with Northern Virginia is that if you want some good old comfort grub from the South, the only place you can go around here that even smacks of home cookin' is Cracker Barrel.  Don't get me wrong...I love me some Cracker Barrel.  Chicken fried steak, biscuits, country ham, dumplins and fried okra?  Um, yes please!

When I feel the need for some super yummy comfort food, I go to the one dish my husband turned me on to - oddly, after I had moved to Northern Virginia! - biscuits and sausage gravy.  One taste and I was wondering how I had lived without this in my life for so long.  Why had no one made this for me before and forced me to try it? (yeah...okay...not that anyone is going to have to force me to try anything that has the words "biscuits" or "gravy" in it)

But I digress.

Usually he is the master chef behind this dish when we have it, but my poor dude has spent the last 4 days working four - count 'em FOUR - 16 hour shifts.  So I always want to make sure he has something yummy to come home to.  Besides me, of course...bwahaha!

Have I mentioned I like simple cooking?
Yeah.  Lazy cooking.
That's the way this house rolls for the most part.  I still throw in a complicated recipe every now and then just to prove I can do it.  (chocolate Guinness cupcakes with Bailey's Irish Cream buttercream and chocolate whiskey ganache are no joke to make, but sooo worth it)

In any case, I decided to turn our beloved biscuits and gravy into a casserole, hoping for more more servings than our greedy butts get with the traditional way of cooking it.  In a way I guess it kind of worked.  We got 4 servings out of it, but mainly because I immediately put them in containers and stuck them in the fridge.  Out of sight, out of mind and all that.  Well, usually.

It couldn't be ANY simpler to make this.

For starters, preheat your oven to a toasty 350­°. Now grab an 8x8 pan, and lightly grease it so the bottom of the casserole won't stick.

Take a one pound roll of sausage - any brand or flavor will do - and brown it in a pan.  Drain that and set it aside for later. Try not to nibble on the cooked sausage, even though the smell has to be driving you bananas.

Oh, is that just me?  Alrighty then.

Now you want to make that pepper gravy.  You can get a package and add water, then warm it on the stove.  That's the easy way to go, and nothing wrong with it at all!

I just find it easier - and a lot cheaper - to make my own.  One cup of milk, 3 tablespoons of flour, ¼ teaspoon of salt,  and 1 teaspoon black pepper.  You can be liberal with the pepper. Honestly, I just grabbed my pepper mill and added cracked pepper until I liked the way it looked. Let this simmer on the stove for a while until it thickens into gravy.  Make sure you taste it to make sure you don't need to add more salt or pepper.  Nothing is worse than gravy that tastes like cardboard!

You know that 8x8 pan you prepared?  Let's decorate it.

Grab a can of Grands biscuits. Now flatten four biscuits and smoosh them together in the bottom of the pan so they make a crust or sorts.

This is why you want to make sure you grease the pan.  Stuck on, inedible biscuits are a major cooking violation that should be illegal.  Wasting biscuits??  A good Southerner would beat you for that one. That's like throwing away fatback.  It's just not done, man!
*tsk*

Alrighty, combine that sausage with the gravy and pour it on top of those biscuits in the pan.

Now take the remaining four biscuits and smoosh them as flat as you can get them.  Making a good crust that covers the top as amply as the bottom was hard for me here...but mainly because I was getting hungry and not willing to spend a lot of time on it! That sausage gravy mixture was begging me to eat it by the spoonful, and it was growing harder and harder to resist so I needed to get that in the oven double time.




Drop that in the oven and bake it until those biscuits are golden brown.  Try not to grab a fork and dig in like a puppy.

Now if I were a good wife, I would have made my own biscuit crust instead of buying canned ones. I might Bisquick it one day and see how that turns out, but if I go whole hog and actually make biscuits from scratch, I am definitely not squishing them in a pan to be a crust.  I'm going to smother them in some marmalade or apple butter or just eat them plain.

Because...homemade biscuits.
Yeah.