Dinner On A Wednesday



Taylor's Biscuits

   Tonight was one of those nights where I just did not want to cook. Fortunately, I had some spaghetti sauce I made last week and some noodles. I highly recommend making fresh tomato sauce every few weeks and freezing it. It certainly has helped me keep my committment to avoid processed foods.
I decided to man up and make some of Taylor's favorite biscuits to compliment the sauce. They take about 15 minutes of preparation and cook in about 12 minutes. The recipe like all of the recipes I use is very easy and quick.

Pre-heat the oven to 450 degrees. In a large bowl, whisk together, 2 cups of flour in a bowl, 2 1/2 table spoons of Baking Powder and 1 teaspoon of salt.  Add 6 tablespoons of butter cut in small pieces. With two knives, cut the butter into the flour. Add 1 cup of milk and mix with a wooden spoon until your ingredients are combined. Now, gently knead the mixture onto the sides of the bowl.

While I was boiling the water and heating up the sauce, I had Taylor roll the dough on a cutting board that was lightly dusted with flour to a thickness of about 1/2".  We then cut it into squares and placed the squares on a cooking sheet. Bake the biscuits in the oven for about 12 minutes or until lightly brown. If you want to get fancy you can brush the tops with melted butter before baking.

The trick with biscuits is to use cold butter and to cut it into the flour as I have described. When you do it this way, you get the really flaky biscuits like the picture at the right.

Let me get on my soapbox for just a minute. You might be tempted to say to me that this is not a very healthy thing to eat. But the ingredients in this recipe are simple and fresh, you just cannot eat the entire batch. I admit that in the past, I have just bought the Pilsbury Biscuits from the dairy section and heated them up in the Oven.  And I will concede that they are pretty tasty. However, since I started this site and made my comittment to feeding Taylor fresh food prepared each night, I started reading the labels and considering the ingredients of prepared foods. You cannot convince me that butter is worse for you than articificial ingredients chemically manipulated to simulate a flavor. Flakiness that derives from Xantham Gum and Propylene Glycol Alganate preserved with something called TBHQ and colored with a chemical not identified at the end of the day is not good. If you start reading the labels of the food that we all eat it will scare you. I am not here to tell anyone what to do. I am just saying that I have absolutely no idea what TBHQ is or whether it is safe.

Okay, I feel better. For dessert we had fresh sliced strawberries, blueberries and pineapples.