ETWYRT: Amie Gibbons

This time, she’s back with a new book and a Southern feast! Amie’s newest is out, and she came asking me if I’d do Pulled Pork, biscuits, mashed potatoes, and green beans to go along with the Southern flavor of her story. The First Reader heard about this and ‘yes, please, do it soon?’

Scorpions of the Deep is her first novel out in a while and she’s excited about it, as she should be. Here’s the blurb:

The police blamed the attack on a bad acid trip. Turns out, it wasn’t a drug, and the destination is even worse…

Sarah Blakely retreats home after her world goes to hell, looking for the peaceful refuge she remembers from her teenage days. While making new friends, one snaps and attacks.

Sarah knows there’s no gods or ghosts or evil things that go bump in the night…

But there are more things on Hell and Earth than are dreamt of in her philosophy, and something out there has her in its sights.

So if that whets your appetite, pick up a copy while you start the pork, you’ll have plenty of time to read!

I’ve done a pulled pork recipe on these pages before, so that’s not what I’m highlighting this meal. No, what I’m going to talk about are those bastions of Southern cooking:

Buttermilk Biscuits

First of all, I have made biscuits so many times, that although I do measure some (you have to, when baking) I don’t always look at a recipe. And there are steps in here where you are doing it by ‘love’ because sometimes things change up a little and you have to add a little less milk, or a little more flour… so I’ve included a bunch of photos of the process. 

Preheat your oven to 400F and have a cookie sheet (ungreased) ready. 

In a large bowl: 

2 1/2 c flour (pastry, if you have it. The lower gluten makes a more tender biscuit)

Sift the flour together with: 

2 1/2 tsp DA Baking Powder

1/2 tsp Baking Soda

1 tsp salt

Then cut in: 

1/2-2/3 c lard (bacon grease if you’ve got it, but that’s more than I usually have on hand)

and finally: 

1 c buttermilk, added slowly. 

If you do not have buttermilk on hand, as I usually do not, you can acidulate the regular milk with a teaspoonful of lemon juice. The acid is needed to fully activate your leavening agents.

Mix gently until your dough comes together and forms a ball. You may not need all your milk, especially not if you put in the larger amount of lard (which makes the biscuit even more tender, almost crumbly, if you like it that way). So go slow with the milk, mix, and add a little extra flour if you have sticky dough. The less you handle this, the better. I pinch and pat to form the biscuits, rather than roll them out and cut them to precise shapes. They’re going to rise, and they’ll be flakiest and best if you don’t wake up that gluten.

I did my pulled pork this time in the slow cooker, and then put the mashed potatoes in the instant pot – 10 minutes under high pressure and a quick release did the trick and they were beautifully done. The First Reader prepared the country green beans, that’s one of his specialties in the kitchen. This made a relatively fast and easy dinner, for all the moving part in it, but it’s nice enough for company or Sunday Dinner. Which is what it was at our house. 

So grab Scorpions of the Deep for a little chill down your spine to offset the summer heat, and make some biscuits to catch the flavor of the South while you’re reading! 

For many more Eat This While You Read That! recipes and books, check out the full list here. Bon Appetit! 

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Eat This While You Read That: Kelly Grayson Eat This While You Read That: Pat Patterson Eat This While You Read That: Amie Gibbons Eat This While You Read That: Amie Gibbons