saturdays

most Saturdays this house is filled with lounging. dogs in sunbeams. men with crossed ankles poring over monthlies. plants drinking quietly out the windows. most everyone but myself. i have an official, potentially clinical, deficit in Sitting Around skills, my body just won't let me. and it is due to this wiggly impetus that Saturdays are also days when baking abounds, the oven is full, the stove is snapping and the kitchen fills the building with proper Breakfast smells.

below is an adaptation from Marion Cunningham's Fanny Farmer Cookbook which a go-to tome for all the basics. (i was schooled in this by a Maine farm wife who was advising me on beginning my cookbook collection. she said "if you need to make a chicken pie or a vodka gimlet this is the cookbook for you." chicken pies and gimlets aside she was right (who are these people having dire, frequent needs for vodka gimlet recipes?), it is a kind of rustic mirror of The Joy of Cooking, which of course everyone's cookbook collection needs, but without the insistence on aspics, milk toast and anatomical drawings of the tastiest bits of a butchered raccoons...) Marion Cunningham also has a no nonsense cookbook called The Breakfast Book  out of which I would certainly glean more mileage, likely. Fanny Farmer and I don't have much of a dialogue past baked goods and kitchen basics. But. the point is that she has good things to say about baking a proper biscuit- an airy one with loft and crust. one that can be tamed and softened with buttermilk. one rolled maniacally in butter, sugar and cinnamon. some fashioned with cream and entitled (squeamishly) Lady Cream Bread Fingers. and this particular adaptation which sought to use up the fistful of marjoram and many dry knuckles of cheddar cheese lurking in the fridge turned out to be one hundred percent great. one of the men of the house happily misheard me suggest "herb and cheese biscuits" and, upon breaking them open said, "what's so urban about these again?" thus:

 

 

Urban Cheese biscuits

(adapted from Fanny Farmer)

2 cups flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

2 tablespoons chopped fresh herbs (rosemary, tarragon, marjoram, thyme, sage, etc.)

1/4 cup shredded or crumbled sharp cheddar cheese

1 teaspoon coarse black pepper

1/2 cup butter or shortening

2/3 cup buttermilk (or 2/3 cup sweet milk + 1 tablespoon white vinegar)

in a food processor combine all the dry ingredients. drop in the fat (i think butter makes for a tastier biscuit while shortening makes for a flakier one) and pulse a few times until the mixture looks like rough sand. tip in the cheese and pulse only a few more times. turn into a bowl,  add the buttermilk and deftly and firmly bring together into a loose mass. turn onto a floured counter top bringing the dough together with as little handling as you can manager. i like use a bench scraper to help with this. pat into a disk and cut into triangles or cut with a biscuit cutter. this dough, which relies on chemical raising agents, will produce the tallest and loftiest biscuits if cut with a sharp blade/biscuit cutter.

bake these guys at 425 for 15 - 20 minutes. 

cheers!