Fresh | A 'fresh' look at biscuits

Many of my best memories involve biscuits.

As a kid, my dad had 2 standard Sunday morning breakfasts. The first one was biscuits and Jimmy Dean sausage patties and the second, reserved for special occasions, was waffles, made with his cast iron waffle maker and covered with fresh berries and real whipped cream. We still have those when I go to visit on holidays, a big brunch followed by a day of cooking a giant dinner.

The biscuits were a more everyday kind of treat. In the summers, my dad would get up early, dragging my sister and I out of bed, and make biscuits and sausage while we put together the rest of a picnic basket, and then he and my mother and us would pick a park and go have a breakfast picnic.

It's one of my favorite traditions. The meal was simple - besides the biscuits, we'd usually have fruit salad and OJ and a big thermos of coffee for my parents. Then, depending what park we were at, my sister and I would run off and play for a while after eating or we'd all go on a walk.

Later, biscuits became one of the special things I did for breakfast for my partner, making a flour mess in our tiny apartment kitchen. Although we didn't have much money, it always felt like an absolute luxury to fill the kitchen with the smell of baking while sipping coffee, reading bits of the Sunday paper to each other and listening to NPR.

This fall, I've found myself in a biscuit renaissance. Between a few huge projects, I've barely cooked the last two months, instead eating terrible fast food, really good take-out tacos or microwave meals.

The other morning, one of the first cold mornings we've had this year, I woke up and cold cereal sounded even less appetizing than it usually does. I needed something hot, tasty and quick. And 20 minutes later, I was eating buttery biscuits and my soul was feeling like it might be a good day after all.

I've made these so many times, I never look at the recipe anymore, and have no idea what cookbook it originally came from; it's just become part of my culinary DNA.

Preheat your oven to 450 degrees. In a bowl, combine 2 C. flour, 3 tsp. baking powder, and approximately 1/4 tsp. salt. It's about 4 shakes of my salt shaker, but you'll have to decide what fits your taste after making them a few times.

Mix all of this with a fork and add about 1/4 C. shortening. Use the fork to work the shortening into the flour until it's crumbly. Then add about 2/3 C. milk. You want the dough to stick together when you make it into a ball with your hand in the bowl. If there's a bunch of dry stuff on the bottom, add a bit more milk, if it's too sticky, add some more flour. Don't knead it, just sort of squeeze it into a loose ball.

Once you have your ball o' biscuit batter, put it on a flat surface and use your hands to press it out until it's about 3/4 in. thick. This is another place in the recipe that's open to artistic interpretation. If you want taller biscuits, make the dough thicker.

Then, figure out what size you want and cut them out. My dad had a tool specifically for this -- an old Hershey chocolate sauce tin. It was about 3 inches in diameter, which is a good size, and the sides of the can were sharp enough to cut the dough. I use a thin-walled glass -- if I want tiny biscuits, I use a tiny juice glass, and for bigger biscuits, I just use a water glass.

After cutting the dough, put the biscuits on a cookie sheet, ball the dough back up, and repeat until you've used everything.

The last biscuit, simply squish all the dough up until it's about the size of the other biscuits and bake it, too. My dad dubbed this the "funny biscuit" and my sister and I fought over who got it until he came up with the system of using even and odd numbered days to determine who got what.

Bake the biscuits for 12-15 minutes, or until they are brown on top.

They are best hot out of the oven. You can dress them up by adding cinnamon to the dough, making ham biscuits for breakfast, dunking them in chili for dinner, or probably even adding savory bits (bacon, anyone?) to the dough, although I haven't ever tried that.

They are pretty much the perfect food.