Country Sausage and Cheese Biscuits

I hope all of you are staying nice and toasty wherever you are!  We have gone from wearing shorts last week to bundling up and not being able to get our bones warmed down here in South Alabama!  We only have a couple gas heaters, so we use lots of blankets and layers around here :)  We have a big old house, so we have to shut half of it off in the winter time to try to keep the heat in and that makes me so depressed.  I am very thankful to have a warm place to lay my head at night though and to have the ones I love with me.

So, with all this cold weather, we are cooking more, especially warm, rib sticking recipes.  This one we kind of came up with on our own.  I made the cat-head biscuits recipe out of the Loretta Lynn cookbook a few times and after visiting a breakfast place around my mother in laws (I want to say it was called the Biscuit King??) we decided to try adding sausage and shredded cheese to these biscuits and they are awesome (although maybe not the best nutrition wise :)

First we start with the biscuit recipe.  You can use this recipe just to make regular cut out or drop biscuits. 

2 cups self-rising flour
1 cup shortening
3/4 cup buttermilk

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Mix flour and shortening together.  Add buttermilk.  Stir until dough leaves sides of the bowl. 

Now here we brown half a pound of sausage.  Drain the sausage and add to the biscuit mixture.  Add some shredded cheese and mix some more.  Drop by the spoonfuls onto cookie sheet and bake until sides start to turn golden brown.  Be careful not to burn the bottoms!

Enjoy and stay warm :)

This post is linked to the Frugally Sustainable Blog Hop.

Snowball Cookies

In an attempt to find some more recipes that included pecans, I remembered that one of our favorite holiday baking recipes originally requires pecans.  I just never use them because my husband is allergic.  Today I decided to do a batch with pecans and one without.  They are so yummy and so easy to make.  Not very calorie friendly, but oh so good :)  Here is the recipe for snowball cookies.  My neighbor calls them wedding cookies.

Snowball Cookies

2 sticks butter
1/2 C powdered sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
2-1/4 C flour
3/4 C chopped pecans

Cream butter and sugar until fluffy.  Add vanilla.  Sift together flour and salt, add to butter mixture.  Add pecans.  Form into 1 inch balls.  Bake on ungreased cookie sheet at 400 degrees for about 10 minutes.  Watch the bottoms, these burn easily.  I pull them out when they almost start turning brown on bottom. 

While hot, roll in powdered sugar.  Let cool and roll again.

Taco Soup

Today I am making a big ole crockpot of taco soup and dreaming of next year when most of the recipe might come from my garden.  This year, the only thing out of my garden is the green peppers!

Taco Soup Recipe

1 green pepper, diced
1 onion, diced
1-2 pounds ground beef
2 packs ranch dressing dry mix
2 packs taco seasoning
2-28 ounce cans diced tomatoes
2-15.5 ounce cans black beans, drained
2-15.5 ounce cans pinto beans, drained
2-15.5 ounce cans sweet corn, NOT drained or a 1 pound bag of frozen corn, add 1 can water

Brown hamburger meat with onions and green peppers.  Drain and add to crock pot.  Add all other ingredients to crock pot.  Stir well and cook on low setting for 6 hours. 

Really great with tortilla chips, shredded cheese and a dallop of sour cream!  My husband and I eat it as a soup, but our kids eat it like a dip, using the chips to scoop it up.  So good!  Perfect for a fall day :)

Pecan Sandies

This past week I cooked some pecan sandies from a recipe I found on pinterest.  They turned out better than I had hoped.  When we first tasted them out of the oven, they didn't really taste like the real thing to me, but after they cooled down, they really did!  We brought some to my mom and a neighbor and they all loved them, so this is a recipe I will be keeping!

Speaking of pecans, we went down to our farm this weekend to ride 4-wheelers and pick some pecans.  We discovered some pecan trees in the middle of one of the pastures that had a ton of them, and they were the good ones too, the small sweet ones.  Well my husband came to pick me up in the truck and we drove around another tree looking to see how much was under it when we heard the dreaded hissing sound.  Not a snake, but a tire.  We discovered that an old metal post had broke off and was sticking up out of the ground where you could barely see it.  So our priceless afternoon at the farm turned into a $150 day at the farm.  Oh well, things happen!

Here is the pecan sandies recipe.  The only thing I changed was adding a couple more tablespoons of flour at the end because it looked still a little too moist.  And I didn't roll and press the cookies, I just dropped them by the spoonful and they turned out just fine!

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1/2 cup packed light-brown sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup all-purpose flour (spooned and leveled)
• 1 cup pecans, coarsely chopped

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees, with racks in upper and lower thirds. In a large bowl, using an electric mixer, beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy; beat in vanilla and salt. With mixer on low, gradually add flour, beating just until combined. Fold in pecans.
2. Roll dough into 1 1/2-inch balls, and place on two baking sheets, 2 inches apart. With the dampened bottom of a glass, lightly flatten each ball.
3. Bake until cookies are golden brown, 15 to 17 minutes, rotating sheets halfway through. Transfer to wire racks, and let cool.