A nostalgic trip back to my childhood…
I would have never said that my mother was a good cook, don't get me wrong, she cooked, there was dinner on the table every night; she just stuck with the basics. As a child, there are a few things that stand out about my mother's cooking - the way she could turn a jar of Traditional Ragu into the best spaghetti sauce I've ever tasted, how she perfected the ability to soft boil an egg only to mush it up with crushed Ritz crackers and butter to make the most special of breakfasts, and in the winter when we would get enough snow, she would help us make snow ice cream (I’m still not sure what that recipe consisted of other than snow). But the most delicious memory was her “biscuit donuts”. If we begged nicely, she would use one of her precious cans of Pillsbury biscuits to make biscuit donuts; this was done at night as a treat, never in the morning for breakfast… if you were going to open a can of biscuits in the morning for breakfast food, they would be baked as biscuits and served with butter and jam, not made into donuts. Which reminds me of another thing we did that I have never seen anyone else do since… mush up butter and jelly together to spread on your toast or biscuits.
One day, a few years ago, I decided to take a trip down memory lane and make those darn biscuit donuts. I used the top off of a water bottle to cut the hole in the center, dipped them into scorching hot grease, and when they were golden brown I placed them in a paper bag with powdered sugar and shook them to death. They were, in comparison to “real” donuts, the worst tasting donuts on the planet; but they tasted so marvelously sweet to me. I scarfed down about 4 of those lil’ puppies and my trip down memory lane filled my heart and soul with gratitude and bittersweet joy.
