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.

Lentil Nachos

We made nachos when we got home last night, for some reason we both had a craving on. No photos for you but you've seen nachos before anyway, and the more useful part of this is the recipe anyway!

Lentil Nachos

For the lentils...

• one can lentils, drained and rinsed (rinsing gets rid a lot of the salt used in the canning)
  
• 1/2 tsp ground cumin
• 1/2 tsp garam masala
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 2 tbsp nutritional yeast
• 1 tbsp veg oil
• few drops Tabasco or other hot sauce
• salt to taste
  

1. Heat oil in saucepan. Add rinsed lentils to pan.
2. Add your spices NB this is totally versatile as far as spices, so don't fret if you have none of this. I really like the cinnamon and a bit of salt is good. Just don't use salty seasonings and taste as you go.
3. Mix 'er up and warm til heated through.

For the nachos...

• multigrain Old Dutch tortilla chips (great texture, less sodium than Tostitos; we used about half a 280 gram bag for the two of us)
• 1/4 cup sliced black olives
• 1/3 cup pickled banana peppers
• 1/3 cup shredded old cheddar
• fresh diced tomato (we didn't have this but it would be a good replacement for salsa)
  
• 1 recipe nacho lentils (above, obviously. Best if still warm because your nachos may cook before the lentils can heat up again)
• salsa for dipsies (watch the sodium in store-bought stuff. It may be 8% of DRV but that's for a small serving size of 2 tbsp)

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Arrange chips on a foiled baking sheet.
2. Spread olives, peppers, tomatoes evenly with your hands. Use a spoon to get your warm lentils all over the place. You may have some leftover, which makes a lovely snack later or lunch side. Top with cheddar.
3. Bake in oven for ~10 minutes or until cheese is melted and before all your chips burrrn.

Enjoy!

Absence!

Oh dear! I didn't realize just how long it has been since I updated my blog. I am citing a number of reasons: vacation out of town, so many news articles to write, and the end of my work term as well as nearing school.

But that doesn't mean we haven't been cooking! And we have certainly been eating: we basically gorged ourselves in Vancouver on sushi, Thai, Indian, and the most amazing cupcakes.

This week we made ramen from scratch, Brian baked bread two days in a row, I started building adorable bento box lunches with knickknacks I bought in Vancouver. Busy busy busy!

I will try to get back to it very soon, once I have got my work life organized so that I don't have to worry about anything.

Ahh...

Badlands and Bean Dip

[scroll down if you're just interested in the bean dip!]

Bri & I spent yesterday driving around our lovely province. Our intent was to visit Drumheller and maybe hit the Royal Tyrrell Museum. After driving through green and yellow prairie landscapes for an hour and a half, we finally began to descend into the dusty and pale Badlands. The temperature was hovering around 30 C, with zero humidity, so I would liken it to being inside an oven. After trying and failing to find somewhere to eat in Drumheller, we decided to see if there was a cafe at the museum. As it turned out, a couple thousand other people (and their hyper, screaming broods) had a similar idea to us; the museum was crawling with sweaty families out for Heritage Day.

Defeated, we tromped off to find somewhere else to eat. We tried a giant pub (kinda like Kilkenny, but with a family restaurant attached) called O'Shea's, where we sat in a booth for 10 minutes without a waitress talking to us (or cleaning the remains of the previous occupants). We decided they did not deserve our money and walked across the parking lot to Boston Pizza, where we had a very underwhelming and overpriced meal of bad cheesey pizza bread and sad little yam fries. It was not good.

But things looked up once we headed to the little ghost town of Dorothy. We had a fab afternoon exploring and taking photos. My photo collection from the day is pretty limited, as I was feeling a bit ill all day from this cold and I was happy to be Brian's model instead.

After Dorothy we hit East Coulee/Rosedale, where we crossed their famous suspension bridge and took a little hike up some hills (not sure if they have a fancy name or something like the hoodoos).

It was a really nice way to spend Brian's almost-birthday. Definitely worth renting a car for the day!

On to snacks!

Vegedible's New Favourite Black Bean Dip

• 1 can black beans, rinsed
• 1 tbsp sunflower oil
• 2 tsp Frank's Red Hot Sauce Original
  
• 2 tsp Rice Vinegar
• 2 tsp lime juice
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
  
• 3 dashes smoke flavour
• 1-1/2 tsp ground cumin
  

1. Combine all ingredients in your food processor and whizz until all are combined and consistency is fairly smooth and thick. Eati right away with fresh veggies and pita chips or store in the fridge a couple hours to let flavours mature.

We had our dip right away with broccoli, carrots and ryvita crackers, as well as some pickles and Queen olives. Deeelightful!

Tonight's menu is homemade birthday pizza!

Ill Blogging

Still here folks!

I've been busy this past week and now I've gone and caught a cold. It's not terribly debilitating, but it is very inconvenient because this weekend we're celebrating Brian's birthday, and next week we're going to Vancouver. Oh, and of course working two jobs. Geez!

Anyhow, here's a snapshot from last week's BBQ night. Oiled up some potatoes and carrots with dill and slivered almonds to throw on the grill.
They were quite tasty but I'm not used to the timing of grilling things yet, so we had to wait around for the potatoes to finish and they still could have use another 10 minutes. We also threw a couple of tempeh (fermented soybeans) patties on the BBQ. I wouldn't bother doing that again as they really didn't taste like much.
I wish I'd had some big onions to grill as well, but alas, I only had yellow zucchini. Bri liked it, but I still have an aversion to that fickle squash after last winter's cleanse.

I'm off to get ready for work. It's forecast to be over 30 degrees C today. I'm not looking forward to it.