My grandmother would always make biscuits. She never bought canned biscuits; she always made them from scratch. I thought she made the best biscuits, and I wanted to make them, too. I would watch her mix her flour and her milk in a bowl, and then she would cut out each biscuit and lay them in a pan to put in the oven.

It looked like she patted the biscuits. She put them in the pan before placing them in the oven, so when she wasn’t watching, I would pat them, too, though I patted them too much because they would not rise, and she didn’t know why her biscuits weren’t rising! Little did I know that I was mashing the biscuits too much and was causing them to be flat.

She finally figured out why her biscuits weren’t rising when she caught me mashing them. She laughed at me and said, “you’re the reason my biscuits are flat!” She then taught me how to do it the correct way, and to this day when I make biscuits, I always think of her.

Lisa Jones, Crumpler, a member of Blue Ridge Energy