Biscuits of Love

This recipe is adapted from The Joy of Cooking's Buttermilk Biscuits & Rolled Biscuits recipes.



Biscuits of Love

• 1-3/4 cups all purpose flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
  
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1-3 tbsp fresh dill
  
• about 5 tbsp chilled butter or shortening, cut into 2 cm x 2 cm blocks
  
• 3/4 soy milk
• 2 tsp vinegar

1. Preheat oven to 450 F.
2. Mix together flour, baking powder, baking soda, dill and salt.
3. Cut in butter or shortening with 2 knives (crossed like scissors) until they become small pea-sized balls.
4. Mix vinegar into soy milk. It will curdle - this is your vegan buttermilk.
5. Make a well in centre of dry ingredients and pour in milk mixture.
6. Stir with a big wooden spoon just until the mixture starts to pull away from the sides of the bowl. Turn dough onto lightly floured cutting board or counter (if your counter tops aren't as old and decrepit as mine). Knead gently 8-10 times.
7. Roll out dough with floured rolling pin to about 1/2 an inch thick.
8. Cut with a floured cookie cutter (obviously I used a heart-shaped one), and place biscuits on an ungreased baking sheet.
9. Re-roll dough scraps as necessary and repeat #8.
10. Bake for about 12 minutes, or until lightly browned.

These turned out really well although I slightly over baked the first pan. Awesome with a dot of butter and hot pepper jelly or any kind of jam...or plain...or with a fried egg on top. Just so good!

Can-o-rama

Our hot pepper jelly.

Cooking the relish.

Oh dear am I ever getting behind!
I've spent the past week or so canning with my mum, which has taken most of my experimental cooking energy. We canned peaches, tomatoes, pickles and peppers and made blueberry & peach jam, hot pepper relish, pepper jelly and ketchup. My kitchen smells faintly of vinegar still.

This morning I made some heart-shaped dill buttermilk biscuits. I overcooked them a bit so they're not as soft as they could be, but still delightful! I used the recipe from the Joy of Cooking (75th Anniversary edition). My mum has had the original cookbook as long as I've been around and it's something I've sort of always considered a standard in our kitchen. I just have it out from the library right now, but I think I will have to put it on my birthday list.

Other projects... Last night I tried to make that potato-veggie pâté again, but this time was almost total failure. The texture was all wrong, as I boiled the potatoes to mashable softness before shredding them so it ended up baking like mashed potatoes. And the peppers I added were sweeter than they were hot so that further skewed the flavour. I'm not too happy with it. Next time I will shred the potatoes while raw and see what I can do from there.

I'm off to work now, here's hoping I can put together a few blog postings before school gets back in.