Monday, March 11, 2024

Well butter my biscuit!

 I've been asked for a long time for my "favorite biscuit recipe" and to do a tutorial. I know it isn't anything you haven't seen before, but here's my version!

Dry ingredients:

2 cup all purpose flour ($.75 - I use organic all purpose)

1 Tbsp sugar ($.03 - I use organic from BJ's)

1 Tbsp baking powder ($.19 - I use Rumford[non-gmo/aluminum free])

1 tsp salt

Wet ingredients:

1 stick of butter, frozen, grated by hand or food processor - 8 Tbsp ($.88 - I used conventional from BJ's)

1 cup of cold buttermilk - ($.75 - I used Marburger from Walmart)

Total cost of ingredients is $2.60


Preheat oven to 450.

Mix all the dry ingredients together with a whisk.

Grate the frozen stick of butter using a hand grater or food processor. 

Mix with dry ingredients until butter is all covered in flour mixture and broken into bits.

Add the cup of buttermilk and mix until no obvious wet patches of buttermilk remain.

Pour onto clean, flour-dusted surface. Mold into a mound, cut into fours, stack on top of each other. Press on the mound and clean up edges again, cut into fours, stack again. See video for reference. Do this until you have a cohesive dough (2-3 more times - mounding, cutting, stacking, pressing)

Once you have a cohesive dough, roll dough out to about an inch or so thick. Use a biscuit cutter and press up and down - do not twist - and cut your biscuits. Place on a parchment lined baking pan with edges touching each other. Bake for 13-20 minutes or so. Top with butter if desired.


Alternatively, you can add a cup of cheese, a healthy crumble of bacon bits, and spices like chipotle powder, to make a fun smokey biscuit. You can do maple sugar instead, maybe double or triple the amount to make homemade biscuits for "McGriddle" type sandwiches. I've also done them with garlic and cheddar cheese to make knock-off Red Lobster biscuits as well. It's a very versatile recipe. Try to work fast to keep your ingredients cold. Unlike cakes and cookies where coming to room temp is recommended, biscuits are the opposite - the colder the better! You can also put your dry ingredients in the fridge for an hour or so to chill them and the bowl as well.


Enjoy!





Friday, February 9, 2024

How many times can your heart break?

Salty tears

Will they stop?

My face is tight,

Eyes swollen

Nose stuffed up 


How many times can your heart break? How can it it love so much and lose so much and still go on? And still find love? Can you pick up the pieces? Can you find them at all? Any? Some? Just one?



Many of you know I found myself unexpectedly pregnant in early December. I was elated. I love both being pregnant and being a mother - adding to our family of three living children who would most lovingly welcome another baby was nothing short of a miracle, to me. Emilia (7) has be ardently praying for a baby sister for the last 4 years- to be disappointed with Edmund’s sex three years ago, and onward prayed nightly for a sister…


We felt her prayers answered. 


I have yet to deliver a living baby not conceived in February. I have had an early miscarriage from an October pregnancy, a stillborn from an August pregnancy and now a 9 week miscarriage from a December pregnancy. 


Here I am, February 9, just after my 38th birthday. 


Weary. 

Drunk. 

And in my bed in total darkness, praying sleep finds me. 

I cannot do this again.



From the moment I found myself staring at that faint line 9 weeks ago, I started exercising, making sure I took my prenatals, eating enough protein, taking time to rest, and honoring my body with all its needs and cravings and fatigue…


But this was not enough….


Sweet Baby did not stay within me, but gave me such hope and joy that my tired, crusty old and pudgey body was good for something more than bread and cookies - I had a new life within that I loved so much…


But heartbreak remains…



Will I find a piece to glue to another? I dare not. The fear of delivering a dead baby - yet again- the strength within me fails. 


How can I go on? My three beautiful children await my recovery, while I make plans to deliver their dead sibling - so loved, so wanted, so much a miracle of life.


Pieces of My Heart - where do you rest? For rest is not found, not in my heart, and I am not okay…



Baby H#5 - I loved you with my whole soul and heart and couldn’t wait to meet you…to see the joy on your siblings’ faces, your father’s face, as you rest in their arms, his arms…to hold your sweet hands as you learn to walk, to nurse you in your hunger, to love you heart and soul…I’m beyond wrecked and I am not okay…


Give me grace, friends….I will not be okay for some time…


The only things I have of my baby H#5…a photo of its sweet little self, resting within me…