When most people think of pumpkin, the first thing that comes to mind is pie. But pumpkin is nutritious, inexpensive and the canned variety is available year-round, so there's no need to confine it just to sweet recipes.
One cup of canned pumpkin has about 80 calories and pumpkin is high in vitamin A and potassium, rich in dietary fiber and also contains nutrients like folate, manganese even omega-3 fatty acids. But when it comes to antioxidants, pumpkin is bursting with beta-carotene, which lends the squash its rich orange hue.
Since pumpkin-growing season is primarily in the fall, other fall foods like chestnuts, apples and sage make naturally delicious flavor combinations. Try layering fresh sheets of pasta in between canned pumpkin with a part-skim ricotta filling. Top with grated Parmesan or Romano cheese and sprinkle on a handful of toasted walnuts.
After the jump, see the Skinny Chef's recipe for Cheesy Pumpkin Biscuits.
Artificial sweeteners aren't for diet products anymore. The Times outlines the ins and outs of sweeteners, and how they're not only entering our cooking but are also ripe for mixing with regular sugar.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson talks about his vegan lifestyle and how sometimes he slips (but only to be polite).
Delicious and buttery biscuits: How the Southern tradition moved out of the home and into our freezers.
We try to keep our kitchens clean, but sometimes bacteria are so very welcome -- especially when you're making homemade yogurt.
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Two and a half months in, I can see through the Biscuit Matrix.
When I embarked upon my trawl toward biscuit perfection at the dawn of aught-nine, it was from a flat, sad, bitter place, indeed. Rather than crispy-footed, larded puffs of sweetly steaming layers reaching -- straining ever heavenward, my oven yielded depressing, molar-cracking pucks I refused to inflict upon my entirely un-picky dogs. Now my biscuits rock, and I'm pretty sure it's a matter of methodology rather than recipe.
Here's what I've learned after a couple dozen batches, and plenty of advice from Slashfood commenters, Facebook friends, cookbooks and Southern grandmas:
- Store the flour in the freezer, and sift it before measuring, even if it says "pre-sifted" on the bag. This has a direct effect upon the density. An overall low temperature keeps fat from heating, so use every opportunity to bring the chill. 3 1/2 - 4 cups of flour scooped straight from the bag can yield 5 cups after sifting. It makes a significant difference. Thus far, Southern Biscuit Self-Rising and White Lily All-Purpose have been very good to me.
- Whisk dry ingredients together, rather than stirring, in order to maintain airiness.
- Don't skimp on the salt, and even if it's not called for in the recipe, toss in a pinch of sugar to aid with a crunchy crust.
The best thing about embarking on a mission to perfect one's biscuit making? You end up with an awful lot of delicious biscuits to eat. The worst thing? Holy heck, that's a lot of biscuits. I'm lucky enough to be married to an enthusiastic biscuit eater, but I don't want to try his patience too badly this early on, 'cause there are dozens more batches to be rolled out before the year is up.
Solution -- adapt one of his most dearly beloved dishes, his grandmother and mother's Memama and Mimiwag's Chicken & Dumplings a bit to accommodate extra biscuits as ersatz dumplings. The original recipe employs long, rolled strips of dough (which some have argued render it as a much more regionally specific Chicken & Pastry formation, but that's a whole 'nother post), but in lieu of that, I halved the biscuits (from the best batch thus far -- #6 White Lily All Purpose with 50/50 Lard/Butter) and stewed them into the sumptuous broth of a whole, cooked-down chicken until they were softened, but not soggy. That night, with a side of sauteed, vinegar-dashed Swiss chard, it was heaven. Two days later, plated with tangy collards -- otherworldy.
Have a favored use for extra biscuits? I beg of you, share it in the comments below.
The less said about this batch, the better. I rolled 'em too thin, left them in the oven a minute or two too long, used too little liquid, achieved little to no loft, and skimped on flavor by switching from lard to vegetable shortening. Perhaps in the hands of a master biscuit maker, these factors wouldn't matter, but perhaps at this point, I need some training wheels in the form of commercial baking powder or self-rising flour.
My other muck-up -- I fell prey to fear of touching the dough too much and barely allowed the ingredients to mingle either during the bowl mixing or the kneading. While I've heard from all and sundry that overworking the dough is the kiss of death, there's got to be a happy medium. And hopefully a few sky-high biscuits.
Tips and more after the jump, and as always, I'd love any advice you feel like sharing.
I do not come from a biscuit making people. That's not to say that I led an entirely biscuitless youth -- just that the addition of water to a measure of Bisquick, and the joyless lumping thereof on a cookie sheet does not, what I consider a biscuit, make. Though this is a matter of great conjecture for folks from all walks, my particular biscuit paradigm is a balance of moist, fluffily layered, lard-laced innards and a crisped-up, nearly brittle top and bottom. A crunch through should grudgingly yield to a just off-sweet, pillowy, melting mass of deliciousness. With shards of salty country ham, a rich swipe of sweet butter, or just steaming hot from the oven, it's handheld heaven.
I can't make biscuits like that to save my life. In '09, that all changes.
With the aid of every cookbook, internet tip, and friends' advice at my disposal, I'm on a mission to perfect my biscuit making. I shall seek the counsel of Southern grandmothers and hound professional chefs until they begin to assail me with dough blenders. I shall become tiresome on the subject. I'm sure my husband would assert that I already have. 'Sokay -- he'll get fresh biscuits out of the deal, as will my colleagues, dogs, dog walker, friends, neighbors, cashiers, subway train drivers. Heck, I probably don't even know you, and you'll likely end up with a leftover biscuit from me.
I dig 'em with the tang of buttermilk and lard's sweet, creamy kiss, but for the sake of scientific exploration, I'll entertain alternate liquids and fats. I've been a good li'l stockpiling squirrel and plundered the shelves of several Harris Teeters and Food Lions during a recent sojurn to North Carolina so that the ingredients may possess the ideal terroir as borne by Southern flours like White Lily, Red Band and Southern Biscuit. I have chilled my lard, readied my sifting hand, and offered a small homage to the spirit of the dearly departed Edna Lewis. I am ready to begin.
This may not be my heritage, but it is my destiny.
The idea started as a way to use up some sour* milk. I couldn't bear to just pour it down the drain and so I started scouting around for ways in which to use it up. I remembered reading a line in a vintage cookbook about saving sour milk for quick breads and muffins (oh, the food knowledge we've lost over the years, I'm sure my grandma Bunny would have know what to do with sour milk without consulting a cookbook). Flipping through my turquoise-covered Joy of Cooking (the edition from the late 1960s), I settled on making a batch of biscuits.
I realize that for many of you out there, the idea of making biscuits to go with dinner isn't a groundbreaking idea. However, I grew up in a family where we did not eat bread products with our evening meal (although my grandparents always had bread on their dining table and my sister and I used to think it was the most thrilling thing ever) and so for me, dinner-time biscuits feels subversive and exciting.
They came together quickly and baked up quickly, adding a level of special-ness and comfort to a regular old dinner. There were a few leftover and I ate them for breakfast the next day with peanut butter and homemade jam.
*When raw milk sours, it's still usable in baking and cooking. Sadly, when pasteurized milk goes bad, it's just bad and can't be salvaged.
As a lover of all things pizza-related, I really have to try these.
It's a recipe for pepperoni pizza, only using Pillsbury's Easy Grands! refrigerated biscuits. I always get a little uneasy when I see an exclamation point in the middle of a sentence instead of at the end. Imagine! how! annoying! that! would! be! if! it! was! done! all! the! time!
Anyway, these look pretty good, and ridiculously easy to make. What I find particularly great is that the Grands! come in various flavors (original, buttermilk, Southern style, etc), so you can get some different tastes without adding anything extra to the recipe.
Actually, it's not a fascination; rather, a depressing history that makes me think about the "Seafood Lover in You" a lot. You see, my family used to go out to eat at Red Lobster a lot when my sisters and I were little. Part of it was that my mother and sisters were bonkers about Alaskan king crab legs (I was never into such messy foods), part of it was that Red Lobster happened to be one of the only "nice" restaurants we could go to in our neighborhood, and part of it was that my Dad thought taking us out to a restaurant in the first place would teach us table manners.
I digress. The point of the matter is that I hated Red Lobster. I don't like the taste of lobster, I don't like the work of eating crab legs, and I thought eating with a bib was beyond ridiculous. However, there was one thing, and one thing only for which I would go back now, as an adult, to Red Lobster: the cheddar bay biscuits.
But thanks to food blog Rasa Malayasia, I might not even have to go back to the horrid restaurant of my childhood. She searched for the "secret" recipe for the biscuits, baked them at home, and has shown the recipe to be just as good as the original, if not better!
Rasa Malaysia, this Seafood Hater in Me thanks you!
There seem to be an endless variety of cookies that people trot out for the holidays. I know that I like to have a lot of variety when I'm just offering cookies (and perhaps hot chocolate) for dessert. Lex Culinaria has gone one better and made a batch o sweet and savory Cheddar and Cranberry Cookies. The cookies are very similar to shortbread, but with the salty tang of aged cheddar that makes them extremely snackable, much like a good cracker. The cookies are of the slice-and-bake variety, so the dough is rolled into logs and stored in the freezer. LC makes a very good point about how convenient it is to be able to just slice off a few rounds for baking when you want some, so you'll always have fresh snacks for entertaining and won't be overly tempted by having a huge batch sitting around.
Brioche is nice and baguettes are lovely, but some meals just won't work without a piping hot, fresh biscuit on the side of the plate. An American biscuit, as opposed to the British cookie-type of biscuit, is a light, tender quick bread that can be sweet or savory. Biscuit Bliss: 101 Foolproof Recipes for Fresh and Fluffy Biscuits in Just Minutes is a cookbook that delivers nothing but biscuits, along with a comprehensive guide to biscuit-making that ensures you'll have perfect results to serve alongside your morning coffee or with a meat-and-potatoes dinner. One thing that it emphasizes up front is the importance of selecting the proper ingredients for biscuit-making, including fats, leavenings and flours. Recipes include classic buttermilk biscuits, sweet potato biscuits and a wide variety of scones.
If you need any more convincing, let me quote one of the Amazon reviewers, who said, "Why would I go out to buy a whole book, even if it's a fairly small book, just on something so simple as how to make biscuits? Because I've never been happy with the biscuits that I've made. The ones made by my grandmother...are so much better than the ones I've been able to make.... I haven't tried all 101 'foolproof' recipes in the book. But I think that this morning's batch is the best I've made yet."
I have had strawberry shortcakes that look like this before and, while the tall cake is pretty, it almost never tastes as good as it looks. Diners spend too much time emphasizing the look of the cake over the flavor. I much prefer the biscuit style of strawberry shortcakes, like the one pictured here from Di's Kitchen. I love the way a slightly buttery crumbly scone-like cake is paired with juicy strawberries and sweet cream. The flavors and textures come together perfectly as the cake soaks up the strawberry juices and the whole thing becomes a lovely summertime treat. One of the best things about it is that it takes a relatively small amount of time to make, since the biscuit component is done in minutes and can be made ahead. Instead of whipped cream, I prefer to top my strawberry shortcakes with a blend of sweetened mascarpone cream, but if you have good berries, you can't go wrong.
If, by some chance, you don't have good berries, check out these strawberry puddings for some alternative uses.
As a lover of all things pizza-related, I really have to try these.
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