First, you make some biscuits. Then, you put some gravy on them, right? Easy. Hold on a second! Yes, it is easy, but the simplest cuisines with clear flavors are also the easiest to mess up. Take it from a former short order cook at a southern diner: The secret is the gravy.

• To be honest, Bisquick makes pretty good biscuits, but, as you can see, the recipe isn't that complex. Besides, now you can say you make your biscuits from scratch!

There are no shortcuts getting perfect white, peppery sausage gravy, which is going to be our focus here. However, biscuits are basically just flour, baking soda and milk, so we'll start with that and then move on to the good stuff.

Biscuit Mix:

• 2 cups flour
• 1 Tbsp baking powder
• 1/2 Tbsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3/4 cup milk (butter milk is best)
• 1/4 cup butter

Just mix 'em up (you can melt the butter first a bit in the microwave). They can be be chunky, so just mix with a spoon or fork, then kneed by hand. The dough should not be wet, just moist and soft and, well doughy.

Biscuit Baking:

You can use a biscuit cutter or just hand-shape dough balls on an ungreased cookie sheet. Personally, I like chunky hand-shaped biscuits best.

Bake at 425 degrees for about 20 minutes.

Sausage Gravy

Ah, the secret is always the gravy, and here's why: the basic recipe is sausage grease, water and flour. Basically, you'll want to cook up a bunch of sausages (say a half dozen) and then use the leftover grease as your base, add a couple of cups of water and then stir in a little flour until it's the right thickness. The only tricky part is adding the flour slowly enough so that it doesn't get lumpy, but even that disaster is recoverable with energetic whisking and an extra splash of water. Pepper it up (black and white pepper), then crumble up the sausages (chunkify them - don't slice) and add them back to the gravy.

Since the gravy is so easy and basic to make, the secret, then, is in the seasoning, and this will largely depend on the sausage you use. Traditionally, the white gravy should be rather peppery, with enough black pepper that you can see it in the sauce. My personal secret is to also fry up a piece of bacon or two and use the grease from that with the sausages (but I always just eat the bacon while no one is looking).

If you want to go fancy, try a little fresh rosemary, chopped up as fine as you can get it. Don't add so much that people can immediately identify the rosemary, but just a hint, maybe a teaspoon or even just a sprinkle.

Cut the hot-out-of-the-oven biscuits in half and open them on the plate. I like to overlap them in the presentation. Put a generous ladle of gravy on them and serve immediately. These really can't sit, because the gravy will rapidly make the biscuits mushy, so dig in!

Order up! DING!