Tag Archives: breads

Learnist Love: Making Buttermilk Biscuits

You can’t buy happiness but you can make biscuits and that’s possibly even better.  Check out this Learnist board on making buttermilk biscuits from scratch that will rival anything you can make out of a can.

What this new year needs is biscuits and pie

Well, it’s New Year’s Eve. How exciting and yet terrifying. I mean, after midnight tonight, it will officially be 2011.  And I have to say, I’m a bit disappointed. I mean, I love my Camry and all but I kind of thought by now I’d have a flying car, or at least a pegasus that was hooked up to a cart of some sort. But no. My vehicle is still a non-magical, non-nuclear powered terrestrial vehicle.

But if I can’t have a personal automotive levitation device, I might as well have the next best thing this new year: brunch. I love brunch. First of all, it’s a delightfully crunchy-sounding word. Brrrrruncccchhh. It’s like weekend-in-a-bowl. It’s also flexible, relaxing, laid back, amenable to last minute plans, sociable and full of delicious flavors and my friends and I are indeed fans of delicious flavors (and also of the TV show Psych). Thus, we are big believers in the awesome healing powers of a good brunch.

Our last brunch was a bit last-minute. It was a couple weeks ago and the planning started on Friday, I think, with Paul messaging me as to whether we were interested in brunching at his place on Sunday. On Saturday, he laid out his menu ideas and we assigned tasks during a quick phone call and then we went grocery shopping for whatever items we didn’t already have in stock. On Sunday, Josh, myself, Brian and Rita trooped over to Paul’s house to get the party started, so to speak, with him and his roommates. Continue reading

A little cream makes everything better

Cream makes everything better.  So does butter.  We always suspected it, but more and more I realize that it’s an eternal truth.  In fact, I’m starting to suspect that primordial ooze was really sweet cream butter.  Yep, that’s right.  Full-fat dairy gave birth to the universe as we know it.

All right, well maybe not.  But it did give birth to these pancakes.  But don’t worry; it was a lot cleaner than you think, and with less screaming.

I’ve struggled to make good pancakes for a while.  I could do it when I was a kid but that was when we bought like, Aunt Jemima boxed mix and it was chemically engineered to be so easy that even a 9 year old could do it.  But when I try to make that kind of magic out of raw ingredients on my own, sometimes it doesn’t work out.  They turn out rubbery or chewy or whatever.  This is, of course, a travesty because Josh likes pancakes.  So Lauren practices her pancakes.  I have a go-to recipe that I trot out and it’s usually pretty good but a few weeks ago, I found a way to make it even better.  And then earlier this week, I tried it again for dinner.  And let me tell you, it works.  What’s the secret, you ask? Continue reading