parsnips aplenty

It’s pretty hard for me to stay put sometimes. I’m in Portland on a mission, to not go anywhere for three years. This has proven a mostly easy place to do that: good house, good friends, good city. I’m two years in to my three-year commitment and I have no plans to go anywhere else when that time is up.

There are many small things I miss about being in faraway places, though, and one of them is a narrower food selection. I live just down the street from New Seasons, a grocery store with seasonal veggie burgers in the deli, bulk fresh herbs, and signage on the fish that lines up with Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Guide. On one level, it’s foodie paradise. On another level, however, it’s over the top. It makes me miss the corner store in the village I lived in in Bulgaria, where I’d go to buy bread and cheese and tomatoes, because that’s all I needed for a nice meal. For most groceries I would ask Dani behind the counter – pasta, flour, eggs – and she would pull them from the shelves surrounding her. The produce would often be a little better quality at the farmers’ markets in the city, predictable and daily. In my tiny Euro fridge I would keep only as much as I needed (well, OK, maybe a little more), and foreign treats were excitedly used.

Back in the land of plenty, I can often be so overwhelmed by all the food choices I have that I’ll just give up and order pizza. I mean, I really love pizza, but when was the last time I got excited about a single item? Between poverty, reruns of French Food at Home with Laura Calder, and dinner last night at Cafe Castagna, I’ve decided it’s time to have a simple plate of food again. I pulled out my trusty lidded cast iron pan, clarified some butter, and seared some Brussels sprouts that I’d picked up at the farmers’ market. Three-ingredient eatin’.

Seared Brussels Sprouts

Take a couple of handfuls of Brussels sprouts and cut them in half through the stem. In a skillet that is not non-stick, heat some clarified butter* over medium high heat. When a drop of water sizzles loudly and violently in the fat, put the sprouts in, cut side down, and cook until they are nearly burned, about 3 minutes. Add 1/2 cup water and immediately slap a tight-fitting lid on the pan. Cook until sprouts are bright green and a knife easily pierces them, 2 minutes. If there’s still water in the pan, uncover to let it cook off. Sprinkle with good salt.

*To clarify butter, melt a stick of it in a pan. When the foaming subsides and the solids have separated and fallen to the bottom, remove from heat and pour through a fine-mesh sieve. Obviously you will not use a stick’s worth of clarified butter for this recipe. This means you have plenty left over for various and sundry uses.

This entry is for Emily, who made this soup with me way back in March. I have been promising her for a year that I would (a) make this soup and (b) write a blog post about it. When she came to visit from Boston, and our friend Kathryn also came down from Seattle, we had a long weekend stuffed with excellent food all over town. By Saturday night we were feeling a little worn out from all the butter we’d ingested (Broder, Bridgeport, Voodoo, Vita, Petite Provence…), so we had a nice little trip to New Seasons and collected some soup ingredients. I took plenty of pictures of our simple supper adventure and happened upon them the other day. I still remember tomato and orange getting along so well, balloons of pasta and soft white beans. The orange is what really makes it, though. It’s a good soup without it, an outstanding soup with. Use dairy-free tortellini and it’s vegan.

Tortellini and Kale Soup
serves 5-6

2 tablespoons olive oil (not extra virgin)
1 yellow onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, halved
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup white wine
large can tomato juice
2 cups vegetable broth
handful frozen tortellini
1 can white beans, drained
1/2 bunch kale, stemmed and roughly chopped
1 orange, sliced in thin half moons

Heat oil in a 4-quart soup pot over medium heat. Add onion, garlic, thyme, cinnamon, and a big pinch of coarse salt; cook until softened and lightly browned, about 5 minutes. Add wine and cook until it doesn’t smell boozy, about 2 minutes. Add juice, broth, tortellini, and beans. Bring to a boil, add kale, and cook 10 minutes. Serve with orange slices. Smile at Emily.

I can be a little coarse sometimes. I think there’s a difference between being nice and being kind, and often those two things work together perfectly, but I can stumble into the latter while forgetting the formalities of the former. I think many people are put off by me when they first meet me, because I am quickly bored of pleasantries and prefer to hear what someone really thinks.

Winter does not make me easier to be around. I looked out the window today and noticed that the trees are finally bare, really bare, spindly and stark. It’s dark by 4:30 and people are ducking indoors much more quickly. We’re all a little snarly, because that’s where our honesty is these days, and we dare ourselves to be nice to other people, because way back in our shivering heads we know we’re all we’ve got.

Last week every food magazine was wetting itself over Thanksgiving. Somehow this year it all seemed overblown to me. It was too nice. I wanted kind, I wanted simple. (Thanksgiving at Laura and David’s was wonderfully so.) The most fulfilling meals I’ve had lately have been made by people who don’t work themselves into a frenzy cooking for me, the foodie who knows what she’s talking about. I’ve been eating dinner made by friends who burned part of it, put the carrots in at the wrong time, served two dishes with completely different flavor profiles. And you know what? I loved them. I loved the food and I loved the people who made it for me. When you overcome a fear of not being nice, all you are left with is kindness.

This is food from me: this is coarse and this is kind. It has three ingredients and it is pungent and unafraid, but it needs support and love to round it out. It looks like green goop. I don’t care. I’m not going to get all Donna Hay on you. It’s amazing and nourishing. Not in the way that spinach is nourishing. I love spinach, but spinach needs a little help to taste great. I eat this and my body says thank you as much as my tastebuds do, because it hits every note. Put a tablespoon or two in pasta with some goat cheese, and serve it to someone who may not otherwise understand that you are kind.

Garlic Chive Pesto
makes 1 quart

1 pound garlic chives or wild garlic
1 cup sunflower oil
coarse salt to taste

Roughly chop the garlic chives, then put them in the food processor with 1/4 cup oil and 1 tablespoon salt. With processor running, add enough oil to make a loose pesto, then check for seasoning. You may not need a full cup of oil, but you will almost certainly want more salt.

I have always had a nice stash of cookbooks, but lately, as they begin to spill off the shelves and all over the house, I’m beginning to admit to myself that I’ve passed the level of blithe enjoyment and moved into… dum dum dum… collecting. I counted them this afternoon: I hover around 130, even with my staunch opposition to buying anything related to Paula Deen. There are a couple of bargain bin bits, with pretty pictures and recipes whose testing process doubtful went beyond, “I think I put about a tablespoon of cumin in there.” There’s the growing pod of restaurant cookbooks – think Max and Rosie’s, not Momofuku. I have a handful of Junior League collections, which I enjoy in the same way that I enjoy community theatre: gleefully but not seriously. Many of the titles include “vegetarian” or “vegan”, which in some way is disappointing. I prefer the title the Greens Cookbook – yes, it’s vegetarian; no, it doesn’t need to trumpet it.

Yesterday I saw a statistic, very possibly made up, that the average cookbook user makes only 4-5 recipes out of each book. Honestly, my number is probably even lower than that. Cookbooks are bedtime reading and inspiration for me, and I have many cookbooks that have taught me much but that I’ve never cooked directly from.

One of these is Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything Vegetarian. (He also has great videos on the New York Times website.) It’s a fantastic resource, with plenty of tables that help explain how one dish can quickly become another. This, to me, is the best kind of general cookbook, because it provides hundreds of recipes but that number leaps to thousands by the guidance and improvisation provided by the author. I recommended it to Ethan recently before I realized that I’d never actually used it.

Well, enough of that nonsense. This morning I opened the book and this recipe immediately made itself known with all the subtlety of a neon sign. This stew is nothing short of a party in my mouth. Port pulls out amazing flavors in the ginger and prunes, the limas are lush and just barely toothsome, and the cayenne brings a brilliant finish. It shows heat but doesn’t interfere with any other flavors. Dried fruit in stew, man. Wow. I need to make more cookbook recipes.

I’m tagging this vegan, because it’s so easily made so. (I used butter but didn’t add the cream.)

Dried Fruit and Lima Stew
from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman
serves 4

8 ounces dried lima beans or 1 pound fresh or frozen
2 tablespoons butter or neutral oil, like grapeseed or corn
2 large onions, sliced
1 tablespoon peeled and minced fresh ginger
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 cup marsala, not-too-dry red wine, or water
1 cup chopped tomato (canned are fine; don’t bother to drain)
12 dried plums (prunes)
12 dried apricots
salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon cayenne, or to taste (I used 1/4 teaspoon)
1/2 cup cream (optional)

If you’re using dried limas, cook them, a day or two in advance if you like. If they’re fresh or frozen, proceed to the next step.

Put the butter or oil in a casserole, Dutch oven, or similar pan over medium heat. When the butter is melted or the oil is hot, add the onions and cook, stirring occasionally, until very soft, at least 15 minutes. Add the ginger and garlic and cook 30 seconds. Add the port, raise the heat a bit, and cook for a minute, until some of the liquid bubbles away. Add the tomato, dried fruit, salt, pepper, sugar, cayenne, and drained limas.

Bring to a boil, lower the heat, cover, and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the fruit is tender, the tomato saucy, and all the flavors combined, about 15 minutes. Raise the heat and boil off any excess liquid (you want stew, not soup); taste and adjust the seasoning. (You can make the stew in advance to this point, then reheat and proceed.) Stir in the cream if you’re using it. Cook for another 30 seconds and serve.

This year I discovered yard sales. I grew up in the country, where we don’t really have yard sales. We have big rummage sales run by little old fundamentalist ladies wearing seasonally decorated sweatshirts, who put up signs like this:

When I first moved to Portland I was living downtown – no yard sales there, either. But last winter I moved over to the east side, and when we emerged from our damp caves at the beginning of summer to take our more regular perambulations allowed by beautiful northwest summers, I started to see them, tacked on community bulletin boards, lampposts, fences: yard sale signs. I began to wander past a few, and as the season wore on, I started paying attention during the week to sales that would be happening that weekend. Always something new-to-me and unusual to be picked up, almost always for the equivalent of change I can dig out of the couch cushions. I’ve bought a Victrola cupboard, a botanical lithograph, a 50-year-old jewelry box. I went really nuts at one yard sale and spent a whole $19. (I may never move back to the country again.)

I’m always keeping an eye out for sturdy kitchen equipment. Buy what you can afford, when it comes to cooking, but on my salary, I can afford aluminum baking dishes from Safeway. So yard sales are it, for me. A few weeks ago I spied two super high quality muffin tins. Sweet! I said. I need muffin tins! $5 each! For two… muffins-the-size-of-your-head muffin tins.

I figured oversized muffins were better than no muffins. So I stuffed them in the messenger bag, along with a bedskirt (I’d been looking for one of those forever! They’re either expensive or heinous. Sometimes both!), and I pedaled back home. And then I made myself some of Deborah Madison’s quinoa muffins. Some credit goes to my roommate: I stole her quinoa to make these. She didn’t mind. Why? Because they’re tasty, that’s why.

This recipe is made for regular sized muffins, not the behemoths I made, for which I just doubled the recipe and thus put twice as much batter in each muffin cup.

Quinoa Muffins
from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison

1 cup cooked or 1/2 cup raw quinoa
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1 cup quinoa flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
1 egg
1/4 c butter, melted, or vegetable oil
1 1/4 cups buttermilk or yogurt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat to 375F. Spray or oil muffin tins.

If cooking quinoa, rinse it well, put it in a small saucepan with 1 cup water, and bring to a boil. Simmer, covered, until the water is absorbed, about 15 minutes, then drain.

Meanwhile, combine flours, salt, soda, and sugar in a mixing bowl. Beat the egg with the oil, buttermilk, and vanilla. Stir wet ingredients into dry, add the quinoa, and mix with a spatula, scraping up from the bottom so that the flour is mixed in thoroughly. Scoop the batter into the muffin cups and bake until firm and light brown on top, 25-30 minutes.

I have selective hearing when it comes to family history. On one level I recognize that there are books’ worth of stories about the people that came before me whose lives intersected and spread, wandering through countries and continents, cities and plantations, immigrant ships and slave ships. It’s an American craving to know how ancestry has been assembled, and I’m not immune to it, but I have been roped into one too many family vacation diversions in graveyards and genealogical societies in backwoods Virginia to have held on to the wide eyed glow of the stories.

“Oh look,” I would say by the time I was 14, swatting sweat bees in front of yet another headstone, on the way to summer camp. “It’s my fifth cousin twice removed by marriage.” And then I would roll my eyes.

Luckily, my mother has a sense of humor about adolescent impatience. She eventually started dropping me off at summer camp and visiting distant cousins on her way back home. This worked better for both of us, since her interest in slave rebellions and my interest in the mall each made the other want to poke herself in the eye.

A few weeks ago I was invited to a party where guests were asked to bring a dish to share based on a family recipe. I realized that, in all my foodie curiosity, I hadn’t done much plumbing of Grandmom’s recipe books, so I e-mailed my mother and asked for some notes. She immediately sent me 6 recipes and asked if I wanted the Christmas cookies too. (Way to go, Mom.) The recipes came from family and from friends who might as well be.

She introduced the rutabaga apple casserole with, “I am also putting in a recipe you used to like a bit when you were little until you decided you didn’t like it anymore, ha.” A little light went off in my head when I saw it, as I’d completely forgotten about it. I updated it a little, made an excuse to use up some mascarpone in the fridge, and I added some caramelized onions – because if you can’t improve something with caramelized onions, it’s time to order takeout. As I pulled the ingredients together, old remembered smells came out and I was suddenly very young, in the cabin I grew up in with my little outpost of family, gathering for dinner. It was nice to be home again.

Rutabaga and Apple Casserole
serves 6-8 as a side dish

2 tablespoons butter
3 yellow onions, cut into 1/4″ slices
2 sprigs thyme
1/4 cup sherry

2 large rutabagas, peeled and thinly sliced
1 tablespoon butter
1/2 cup mascarpone or cream cheese
1 tablespoon neutral oil

2 tart apples, peeled and thinly sliced (I like to use a mandoline)
handful brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon allspice

1/3 cup flour
1/3 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons butter

Preheat to 350F and grease a 2-quart casserole dish.

Caramelize onions: In a pan over high heat, melt butter. Just as the solids start to brown, add onions, stir to coat with butter, and turn the heat down to medium. Add a teaspoon or so of kosher salt, half a teaspoon of black pepper, and cook, stirring occasionally, until very soft and very brown, about 20 minutes. Add thyme and sherry and let cook until liquid is almost gone. Taste for seasoning and set aside.

While onions are cooking, bring a pot of salted water to a boil and add rutabaga. Cook until soft, about 10 minutes. Drain and put in the food processor with butter, mascarpone or cream cheese, and oil. Add salt and pepper to taste. Set aside.

Toss apple slices in a bowl with brown sugar and allspice. In a separate bowl combine flour, brown sugar, and butter. (This will be the topping.)

Spread half of the rutabaga puree in the bottom of the casserole dish. Apples go on top of that, then onions, then the second half of the rutabaga. Top with the flour mixture and bake for an hour. Let rest for 10 minutes before cutting.

This is best served with something green and sharp that will cut through all the richness. I steamed some kale and tossed it in a tangy vinaigrette, and it worked very well.

My pantry exploded a few weeks ago.

I went on an unnecessary but fascinating grocery shopping trip, and as I was unloading my treasures, I put a bottle of juice on the shelf, thinking, “Wow, this shelf has held up really well, especially with all of these glass jars I’ve been putting things in.”

I wandered back into the bedroom and puttered around a little bit when I heard a giant crash in the kitchen. I took a deep breath, emitted a mild expletive, and walked back to the kitchen to see the contents of the pantry making a brightly colored stream of glass and goodies across the kitchen floor. Luckily, only two jars broke (the pantry doors cushioned the blow as the shelf collapsed), and neither of them was liquid. We took it as an excuse to do a little kitchen clearing, and we found all of this… stuff. Everywhere. Too many times I found myself saying, “Ooh, I’d forgotten I had that!”

In the professional kitchen I work in, I feel tremendous guilt when I say that. Finding a case of food in the walk-in freezer that I had insisted on ordering two months ago, and then forgotten about? Not cool. I saw too many unused items in the pantry, and it was time to resist the eating-out temptations that are so rampant in Portland. So I backed off on the grocery shopping for a couple of weeks. I did all right – didn’t go out to eat too much, had a couple of friends over for dinner to help clear things out. On Saturday, I was at the store buying milk and bread, and I spied some cacao nibs.

“All right, self,” I said. “If you’re going to buy these, you need to use them. Soon.”

So I did.

Sugar Cookies with Cacao Nibs
adapted from Mennonite Community Cookbook
makes about 6 dozen cookies

1 cup butter
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 eggs
5 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon soda
1/4 cup milk
about 1/2 cup cacao nibs

Cream together butter and sugar. Add vanilla and eggs and beat until fluffy.

Sift together flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda. Add alternately with milk. Stir until dough is smooth. (I can’t tell you how much easier this is with a mixer than with a wooden spoon and biceps.) Chill in refrigerator for several hours.

Preheat oven to 400F. Roll out to 1″ thickness. Sprinkle top with cacao nibs and keep rolling to 1/4″ thickness. Cut in desired shapes. (I like the plain old circle.) Place 1″ apart on a greased cookie sheet and bake 8-10 minutes. Cool on racks.

Forgive the hyperbole, but this really is the easiest thing ever.

Grate or julienne a few radishes. Mix it in butter. Good butter. Sea salt, black pepper.

Now, go back outside. It just got warm.

I am not a great cook.

I’m usually a good cook. Some days I’m a very good cook. When I have the occasion to put cinnamon and garlic in the same pan, I’m a damn fine cook. But there are no culinary revolutions being staged in my kitchen. I spend my days working next to people who were born with the gift of good seasoning, and I’m glad to learn from them. I’d like to think I’ve picked up a lot in my year and a half of professional fooding. Little things, like peeling ginger with a spoon (try it!), bigger things like finding a love for fennel I never thought I could have, gruelingly essential things like scrubbing walls. (And the occasional ceiling, thanks to a long night with butternut squash puree in an overzealous blender.)

My short life in a big kitchen has given me a hundred new ways of looking at food. At first I was so distraught by the amount of meat being processed during my day that I was very nearly vegan outside of work. After a few months, I all but stopped cooking for myself at home, out of frustration and exhaustion. This inevitably resulted in a diet that left me undernourished and cranky, not aided by the fact that I was readjusting to life in the U.S. and going through my first nasty gray gray gross awful gray Portland winter. It wasn’t until spring came that I remembered that I have friends who enjoy it when I cook for them. I had a dinner party for a few people and spent all day emptying my fridge, emptying my winter blues, emptying my culture shock and refilling my lungs with the air of community in food that I have always so loved.

I have people over often, now, for dinner. Or lunch. Or whatever I just pulled out of the oven.

For the past month, Zeke and I have set a challenge for ourselves to not eat at restaurants for a month. A month! We have a couple of caveats, of course – supermarket delis don’t count, and we can go out on the weekends as long as we keep it under $5. (This means that I can continue to have my weekly nosh-and-crossword at Clinton Corner Cafe; there’s just less noshing and more crosswording.) The point? Spend less, cook more. When I told Nico about it, he said, “For you, that’s like breathing with only one lung.” He’s right. My list of the restaurants I’ve dined at in Portland is way over the 100 mark, in a year and a half. Part of this is for the sake of convenience, part of it is wrapped up in socializing, but the majority of it is centered around being a foodie.

On Thursday, I can eat out again. Have I spent less? Hell no. My grocery bills are ridiculous. If I do this again – and I think I will – I will do it with the added rule of a tight weekly grocery budget. Have I cooked more?

Yes. Of course. While some of that “cooking” translates to “making guacamole and heating up a Trader Joe’s Indian meal” (those things are SO good), a lot of it ends up being similar to what I made in Bulgaria. I’m reminded that I don’t mind eating the same thing every day, as long as it’s not leftovers – I’m awful about eating leftovers. If I made myself avocado quesadillas every day, I wouldn’t feel as though I cheated myself out of a good meal. I’m a good cook because I know what I like and what I’m willing to experiment with. I’m not a great cook, because I still have a cluster of Weird Foods in my pantry that I haven’t been inspired to use well.

At the moment I’m reading Deborah Madison’s What We Eat When We Eat Alone. I’d like to think that she and I would have wonderful conversations about food – her writing nearly always calls to mind exactly what I’ve been thinking about and haven’t yet put into words. Heading into the last week of the No Restaurant challenge, I’m glad to be reminded of more small, achingly simple meals that do not come straight from Trader Joe’s. After reading the first chapter, I knew immediately how I should photograph this entry’s dish. It’s absolutely unadorned, with no thought to plating, and it’s next to me on the couch that collects cat hair. Because that’s how I’m eating it. And you know what? It’s luscious and filling and healthy. When I eat alone, the appearance of the dish is important only as far as how much it affects flavor. Friends who don’t cook tell me I have an eye for presentation, but most of the time the fact is, if you’ve cooked something well, it presents itself well.

Here’s a recipe for some wonderful trout cakes. (Nearly vegan, not so much. I’ve started eating fish again.) This is one of my favorite recipes that I’ve posted lately, even if I did burn them a little. It’s a great way to start using fennel if you’re not familiar with it. I put it in anywhere that celery – one of my least favorite vegetables – is called for, and I think it makes things taste quite grown-up. You can make a larger batch of these and freeze them. You can give them a nice sauce and serve them over a bed of greens, with a side of mascarpone-finished polenta. Or you can eat them off your lap on a Sunday afternoon on the couch, before or after you vacuum the cat hair.

Fennel and Red Pepper Trout Cakes
makes 4

1 teaspoon each: black mustard seed, whole black peppercorns, coarse salt, dried thyme, dried marjoram, anardana (optional – a splash of apple cider vinegar will work fine instead)
1/2 teaspoon each: fennel seed, fenugreek seed
1 1/3-pound trout fillet (skin on)

1/4 cup finely diced fennel bulb (half a small bulb)
1/4 cup finely diced red bell pepper (half a small pepper)
1 large shallot, finely diced
1/2 cup finely chopped parsley
1/2 cup panko breadcrumbs
1/4 cup mayonnaise (I like the vegan stuff)
1 tablespoon dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon coarse salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

2 tablespoons olive oil

In a wide skillet combine all the spices listed before the trout and add enough water to come about an inch up the side of the pan. Bring to a boil, then drop it down to a bare simmer and add the fish. Poach 2-3 minutes, until just barely cooked. Remove from poaching liquid and set aside. Discard poaching liquid, rinse the pan out, and set it aside.

Combine all remaining ingredients except olive oil. Remove any black peppercorns that might be hanging on to the fish, take the skin off, and flake it into the mixture. Combine well and form into four tight patties. Tighter than the ones I made.

Heat olive oil in the skillet over medium high heat. Add patties to the hot oil and turn the heat down to medium. Cook 2-3 minutes until browned, flip, and cook 2 minutes more. Eat.

You can tell a foodie by how she packs for an extended trip abroad. When I moved to Bulgaria, I took black beans and quinoa, and I left a list of foods that my friends and family should feel free to send any time they had an urge to put a care package together. Sage! I said. Ranch dressing mix! Molasses! Marcy scours the Asian grocery before a trip to Europe. Nolan brings a jar of mole. When Krista went to Mexico, she made room in her suitcase for a 5-pound bag of White Lily flour. This is how I knew we’d be friends.

I have spent much of my brief life looking for good biscuits. Usually, I paid for them. (I think there’s a support group for that.) Outside the American south, amazing biscuits are hard to come by – most folks don’t understand that the point is to use just enough flour to hold all the fat together. What ends up happening without this rule is a lump of baked dough that tastes like toothpaste without the minty freshness, thanks to all the baking soda that gets thrown in.

I could always make decent biscuits, but I needed a gobstopper of a recipe to support the technique I understood. A few weeks ago, I found it. It’s in the Gourmet cookbook, and everyone who’s eaten these that I’ve made for them has said little more than “oh. Woah” before they vacuum them up off the plate. Then they look at me in adoration, a buttery gleam in their eyes, and say, “…could you, uh, make those again?”

You’d think that I would make enough of a recipe that people wouldn’t need to ask for a second batch. But when a stick of butter makes only four biscuits… Well, you’ve got to pace yourself.

When I made them this morning, I took a bite, held it for a second, and literally felt it melting in my mouth. I didn’t know that was possible with anything that wasn’t chocolate ganache. I see no other biscuit recipe but this one from now on.

Biscuits
adapted from The Gourmet Cookbook
makes 4 giant biscuits

2 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon coarse sea salt
1 stick butter, chilled and cut in tablespoons
3/4 cup well-shaken buttermilk (I like to use 1/4 cup almond milk and 1/2 cup yogurt)

Preheat to 425F. In a large bowl stir together flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Add butter and cut in with forks or a pastry cutter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add buttermilk and stir just to combine.

Turn out onto a well-floured surface and knead 5-6 times, until the dough starts to come together. Pat into a small circle, about an inch and a half thick. Using a 2″ ring mold, punch straight down into the dough, no twisting. Reform dough and cut out three more biscuits. Bake 10-15 minutes, until golden brown and delicious. (You’ll hear them sizzle on the pan. It’ll be great.) Eat with apple butter and sweet tea.