Biscuits

The same day that I made the delicious Olive Garden copycat minestrone,  I was thinking how I wish I had planned ahead enough to make some breadsticks to go with dinner.  Of course by the time I thought of it, it was way too late to work with yeast, but I had recently seen a recipe for biscuits in my mom's Country Living magazine.  Best of all, they called for self-rising flour.  I've had a bag of that stuff kicking around since I had Tracy pick me up a bag of flour when we were at the beach house in July.  She brought me self-rising and I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.  It already has all sorts of stuff mixed into it and so I never know what to add or subtract to recipes.  I'm an all-purpose, bread, whole wheat, or cake flour girl myself.  But here was a recipe promising to use up 2 cups of self-rising flour.  I was sold.

The dough is very easy to throw together, only calling for the flour, shortening, and buttermilk.  Can you believe all you need for biscuits is 3 ingredients?  Once you have the dough, you pat it out - no need for a rolling pin - and use a biscuit cutter to cut them out (AKA a cocktail glass turned upside down, in my case).  10 minutes later, you are eating biscuits.

Something strange happened to my biscuits; they didn't rise very much.  As you can see from my pictures, they sort of looked like crackers.  But that didn't even matter.  My family loved them and devoured all 12 of them before dinner was over.  I am fairly certain I saw Alex eat 3 of them.  And really, when they were that easy to make, there is not much excuse not to have them multiple times a week (at least until I run out of that flour!)

Recipe:

biscuits
from Tricia Yearwood for Country Living Magazine
yield 12 biscuits

Ingredients:
4 tablespoons vegetable shortening
2 cups self-rising flour
3/4 cup buttermilk, well shaken

Instructions:

1) Preheat oven to 450 degrees.  Lightly grase a baking sheet with nonstick cooking spray.

2) Using a pastry blender or two table knives, cut shortening into flour until it resembles coarse meal. Use a fork to stir in buttermilk to make a soft dough , or until dough comes together and leaves sides of bowl.

3) Continue stirring with fork until all flour is worked into the dough.  Then turn dough out onto a lightly floured board and knead 3 or 4 times until smooth and manageable.

4)With your hands or a floured rolling pin, flatten dough to a thickness of 1/2 inch.  Cut dough with a 2 1/2-inch floured biscuit cutter.  Place rounds on baking sheet 1 inch apart for crisp biscuits or almost touching for softer biscuits.  Bake 8 - 10 minutes or until lightly browned.