What's for Dinner? 2/21/11

 Breakfast is what's for dinner! Brad and I eat breakfast for dinner a couple times a month. We just like it. Sometimes we do pancakes and eggs. Sometimes I do sausage biscuits. Sometimes I do bacon and eggs. This time I made bacon, eggs, and biscuits.  Here's the recipe I used to make the biscuits (adapted from Alton Brown on Food Network). I actually halved the recipe to make only four biscuits but here's the whole thing.

Southern Biscuits                        

Ingredients:

2 cups	Flour (either all purpose, or half whole wheat and all purpose. I used half whole wheat)
4 tsp	Baking powder  1/4 tsp baking soda
¾ tsp	Salt
2 tbsp	butter
2 tbsp	Shortening (sometimes I just use 4 tbsp butter because I don't keep shortening around)
1 cup	buttermilk (I usually just "make" this by putting vinegar in the milk. But often I just use regular milk because I don't have vinegar on hand)

 Preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Dump in your flour....

 Salt, baking soda and baking powder (which is not the same as baking soda. I accidently put 2 tsp baking soda in this batch and had to scoop it out) and mix it up a bit.

Chunk up your butter and shortening (I just used butter this time) like so and throw it into the mixture.

 This is the fun part. With your bare (clean) hands rub the butter into the flour mixture until it looks like crumbs.

 Make a well in the center of the butter/flour mixture and put in your (butter)milk. Try to work quickly because you want your butter and milk to remain cold. The colder the fats are when you put them in the oven the flakier and more yummy they will be. Mix together the milk and butter until it just comes together. The dough will be incredibly sticky and that's ok.

 Dump the dough out onto a floured surface. I got a little flour crazy. Please use less when you make them. Knead the dough on itself a couple times.

 Pat the dough into a 1in thick round. Cut out the biscuits. I used a cookie cutter, but you can use a drinking glass or a real biscuit cutter.

 I grease the cookie sheet because I'm paranoid about the bottoms sticking to the sheet. Put them on the sheet so they're just touching. Pop them into the oven for 15 minutes or until the tops are golden brown.

Now onto the rest of breakfast! I used to hardly ever make bacon because you have to pay attention it very closely, which makes it hard to get the rest of a breakfast meal done. So my solution? Bacon goes in the oven. Just throw the bacon on a cookie sheet (with a lip because bacon gets really greasy) and put it in the oven until your desired crispiness is achieved.

 

I scrambled three eggs for Brad (I wasn't feeling eggs last night. So I had something else instead). Anyway, put your three eggs into some sort of receptacle and add a tablespoon of milk. Using a wisk or fork mix it all up so they're scrambled!

 Dump them in a cold pan and cook them. I spray my pan first because we don't have non-stick pans.

 The finished product! Yum!