By: Lyndsay Crews
Chicken and Dumplings
1 cooked rotisserie chicken
1 box (32 ounce) chicken broth
1 can (8 count) of Pillsbury Grands biscuits
Take the chicken off the bone and shred it into small bites. Empty the chicken broth and the amount of chicken you want into a large sauce pan. Heat should be set on medium to medium-high. Heat for about 10 minutes. Then, open the can of biscuits and pull apart each biscuit into bites. (One biscuit is about 4 bites.) Place them in the broth and let cook for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. (Broth will thicken)
Hint: If you have people coming over or a larger family, you can easily double this recipe.
Easy Tilapia
4 Tilapia Filets, fresh not frozen
2 Tablespoons Butter, melted
1 Clove Minced Garlic
2 Tablespoons Lemon Juice
Move the oven rack to the second tier down from the top of your oven. Preheat oven to broiler setting Hi. Wash tilapia filets and lay them on a baking sheet. Mix butter, garlic and lemon juice together. Spread the mixture over each tilapia. Let it cook for about 5-7 minutes (depending on how big your filets are) and then take it out. Flip the tilapia. Let it cook another 4 minutes. Take them out and flip them over again. If they flake with your fork, they’re done. If not done, put them back in the oven until cooking is completed.
Hint: We really like the lemon flavor in our house, and we use more than the recommended amount.
Ok, that’s totally cheating (and I believe in that kind of cheating). Grandma Crews’ recipe was only a little more complicated. I’m sure you remember this from visits to Ga-Ga’s house and if you don’t, just ask Scott and he’s likely to rave a bit.
Instead of the biscuit mix, she mixed up bisquick biscuits (according to the directions) and worked the batter hard. Then she rolled them out very thin and flat and cut it into small pieces (I use a pizza cutter for this). Once the broth was boiling well, she cut the would drop the pieces into the broth in small batches, as she cut them, and add the counter flour at the end. The counter flour thickens the broth and makes the whole thing nice and gooey.
Personally, I’ve started making my own bisquick from scratch because the real stuff makes my head fuzzy and shortening is not really food. It’s not a hard recipe–Here’s one that’s basically what I’ve been using:
6 cups flour
1/4 cup baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup cold butter
It’s a good idea to start this in your stand-mixer and finish up with a pastry cutter. The stand mixer will get the butter into small chunks, but you probably want the chunks a bit smaller than it can make. I’m trying flour from Italy now because even the organic stuff from the US is giving my head trouble.
Try it out one day when you have a few extra minutes. It makes something of a mess, but doesn’t take that much more time because you have to get the stock boiling anyway.
I know I cheat…so thanks for sharing this! You can never go wrong with a ‘grandma’ recipe.