Weekends are for making treats. It makes the weekends so much more special when there is something yummy that I can make/have only on the weekends. Breakfast is a very good opportunity for these treats, and this weekend, I made homemade jam/jelly and biscuits/scones. This seems like an appropriate follow-up to my strawberry shortcake post, since American strawberry shortcakes are made with biscuits...
Biscuits come in many forms with many innards and many shapes. I've had drop bisucits, cut out biscuits, biscuits with dill, biscuits with buttermilk, biscuits with cheese, biscuits by Bisquik - the list is endless. Because I tend to prefer a lower butter content - no, no, it's not driven by any fear for fat - I really do prefer the taste of less butter, unless of course when I was eating 'toast' in Paris with Parisian butter - something about that butter, it was SOOOO good! I'm digressing. Back to the biscuit.
My friend, Colleen, is Australian, and has a totally different definition of a biscuit. We recently concluded that my biscuits were really just another name for what she calls scones. Our scones are much drier than biscuits and I find them to be too crumbly and lacking in gentle tenderness I look for in my morning pastry. I learned how to make biscuits when I was working at the bakery in the co-op I belonged to in NC. I now have a very light drop biscuit recipe, which is crunchy yet moist, cakey yet bready. It is surprisingly simple and so very tasty. And they have a wonderful aroma as they put on their brown coats, preapring to awe you at showtime when the oven door opens.
Here's my first recipe post:
1 cup all purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
1/2 cup milk
2 tbp butter, melted
Mix it all up - dries and wets separately, then with each other - and bake in 450F oven for 15-20 min, or if you actually have an oven that hits 450F (mine is about 15 yrs old and doesn't get hot), maybe even less time. This recipe makes 6 small biscuits, perfect for one meal with a few friends.
That's all there is! And it's so very good, esp. with home-made jelly/jam (Colleen calls them one thing and we call it another, but my Japanese brain is refusing to register which one is which right now...), or with scrambled eggs, sausages, and the Magic Red Sauce from Heinz.
3 comments:
Jelly is usually clear...mostly fruit juices. Jam, on the other hand have bits of fruit still left.
So, a strawberry jelly would be red clear stuff.
A strawberry jam would have chunks of strawberries.
...at least from what I know...
australians would eat jam with their scones, not jelly, as to any australian, jelly is what any northern american would refer to as 'jello'.
part of me wishes australians actually had an equivalent of american 'biscuits' because something tells me biscuits and fried chicken with gravy would be ... really really good. (and artery clogging.)
-juji
(i know all this being an australian who read a lot of non-local food blogs, and who has been raised on lots of american tv/movies!)
Juji is so very right. If I were a condemned man and had to chose a last meal, it would be fried chicken, biscuits, mashed potatos w/ gravy and green beans, all washed down with iced tea. For dessert, warm apple cobbler w/ vanilla ice cream. Yum! Here in Georgia that's haute cuisine.
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