American Entree
PIGS IN A BUTTERMILK BLANKET
INGREDIENTS
1 16-ounce package jumbo buttermilk biscuit dough
1 cup grated Four-Mexican cheeses
8 turkey franks
PREPARATION
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Separate the dough into eight pieces. Elongate each dough piece with a rolling pin dusted with flour or simply roll a turkey frank along the dough if any are remaining.
(You don’t have to use turkey franks instead of beef franks or buttermilk biscuits instead of plain ones in this dish. In keeping with this cookbook’s theme of “Cooking with what’s handy,” I used, well, what was handy. You can even use a 10-ounce package of dough, but it will mean thinner blankets for your pigs.)
Sprinkle grated cheese evenly among the eight dough pieces. Put a frank near one end of a dough piece and wrap the dough around the frank. Put this work of art on cookie sheet with the dough overlap on the bottom. Otherwise, the dough will bake apart and you will have “Pigs in a Buttermilk Boat.”
Bake in oven until biscuits are golden brown or about 10 to 15 minutes. This is a bad time to hibernate; monitor your Pigs in a Buttermilk Blanket to make sure they don’t burn or cook unevenly. It’s discouraging to have part of a baked dish be burnt on one side and doughy on the other. You might need to rotate the Pigs at least once. Heat escapes each time you open the oven, so in these cases you might need to cook the dish a minute longer. Remember, vigilance when baking.
TIDBITS
1) This tidbit was eliminated during editing.
2) April 24th is National Pigs in a Blanket Day.
3) This dish is also known somewhere as “Weiner Winks.”
4) The British make Pigs in a Blanket by wrapping up small sausages in bacon.
5) Footballs were originally made from pigs’ bladders. This sounded so gross, people took to calling them pigskins. These early footballs could very well have been the inspiration for air pumps. But footballs made from cows’ bladders would have been huge, while ones coming from chickens would have been tiny. Would Payton Manning have thrown all those touchdown passes if he had been tossing chicken bladders downfield?
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I think I’d like the British version better.