The Grandma Biscuit.

When I was growing up, one of my favorite meals was biscuits and gravy. Not just any biscuits and gravy, though. My MOM’S.

No one else’s can compare.

She made it almost every school day. My mom was a foster mom to a lot of kids over the years, and when I was in high school we had a houseful of teenage boys. Many of them would horde food in their rooms. Sometimes, it took a while for them to understand that there would be always be a next meal and there would always be plenty. To help them trust that, my mom would get up every day around 5 a.m., study her Bible, and then make a huge breakfast of biscuits and gravy, eggs, and either sausage, bacon, or ham. It was the biggest meal of our day and many times my only meal due to after school activities, sports, and work.

She always sat down to eat with us, and not a fork was lifted before she was at her place. She let us all have our fill with one exception: no one touched the Grandma Biscuit.

To be honest, I’ve never liked making biscuits. They’ve never turned out like hers, so naturally I thought, “What’s the point?” For the last several years I’ve made drop biscuits, which require no rolling or cutting. You simply make your dough and literally drop wads of it onto your cookie sheet and there you go. Biscuits. We always tear them apart to top them with gravy anyway, so again…what was the point.

Yet something was missing.

Enter my new favorite super secret. It’s JoJo’s Biscuits, from Joanna Gaines’ cookbook, Magnolia Table, and she has the perfect-for-me biscuit recipe.

There’s no rolling or folding; just spreading the dough out with your hands and cutting. And they are delicious (mostly because of the three freaking sticks of butter in the dough – I’ll never have to butter a biscuit and risk tearing it again.)

The bonus is this. There’s the weird bit of remnant dough that’s not enough to make into a round cut biscuit, so you mush it into an oblong bit of spaziness and tuck it in the corner of the pan.

The Grandma Biscuit. BOOM.

And since I have now been a GiGi for three whole years, nobody had better touch my biscuit. Even my kids know this is the legendary biscuit and revere it.