Hello. It’s been a while, but here I am ready to write about food cooked in a new kitchen in a new home in a new city (that we like a lot thus far). More about that later. And by later, I mean another day.

All I want to do tonight is share a biscuit recipe with you. I was craving bread tonight, but I didn’t feel like leaving the warm house to buy some and I didn’t feel like waiting 3 hours for a loaf of homemade bread. So I made biscuits. They’re easy and ready to eat in less than half an hour from start to finish.

Once the idea of biscuits was in my head, I remembered that I bought a copy of James Beard’s American Cookery a while ago just for his biscuit recipes. I made a lot of biscuits with my mom as a child and the biscuits were almost always from my parents’ well-loved James Beard cookbook. My claim is that I was making biscuits on my own at age 5, but my husband doubts the truth of this statement. Maybe I wasn’t really 5, but I was young. And I made a lot of biscuits.

So, the biscuits I made tonight are the biscuits of my youth and they were as good as I remembered them to be. When I was a kid, we often made these with buttermilk or recently spoiled milk. And when we had it in the house, we often mixed in a little bit of strawberry cream cheese. It might sound weird, but it was actually quite wonderful. Tonight I had a bit of heavy cream that I needed to use, so I threw that into the dough instead of regular milk…but normally I’ll use 2% milk.

Since biscuits need jam, I cracked open a jar of peach butter that I made last summer. If you’ve got a jar of homemade preserves at home, you should use some of it on these biscuits.

Baking Powder Biscuits

Recipe from James Beard’s American Cookery

Ingredients

• 2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup shortening
• 3/4 cup milk (I used heavy cream this time, but normally I’ll use 2% milk.)
• 1 tablespoon sugar (Optional, but I used it.)

Directions

1. Sift the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar (if used) into a bowl.
2. Cut in the shortening (butter, lard, vegetable shortening, chicken fat – what you will). The pieces of fat should be quite fine.
3. Add the milk and stir quickly until the dough clings together.
4. Turn out on a floured board, knead a few times, and pat or roll out to 1/4 to 1/2 inch thickness.
5. Cut into rounds with a floured cutter 1 to 2 inches in diameter.
6. Place on a buttered cookie sheet, or, if you like biscuits crisp on top and bottom and soft in the center, place in a buttered 9 x 9 inch pan.
7. Bake at 450 degrees 12 to 15 minutes, or until light and brown.