When Boys Bake

Husband Chris made these fantastic feta-tomato scones a little while back. Before I knew it, he had them popped in the oven, out and deliciously fragrant and warm!

Chris is my total opposite in the kitchen - I make a lot of fuss and mess, leaving ingredients out and little piles everywhere. Cleaning takes place after the meal (if there's still time and energy). Chris tidies up behind himself. Everything gets put away in an orderly fashion, and by the time the food is ready, generally the kitchen is clean. I've tried to adopt his style, with varying success.

However, this time around, although all of the ingredients got put back in their proper places, some were left, ahem, behind...

Butter My Biscuit!

I have been going like gangbusters on baking. I had no oven for four years (yay boat living!), so since returning to dry land I have been adding flour to liquid as much as I can. Last night I made these fantastic cheddar-rosemary biscuits to go with a pork chop dinner.There is something so reminiscent of my childhood about baking. We were a from-scratch household and I have been a bread-o-holic since birth, so there was a lot of baking going on. I was the go-to biscuit maker from a young age, made cakes for holidays that may or may not have required one, and had a short lived cookie business (my mother was asked to no longer bring them in to work). One night, I had a flour fight with my best friend in the middle of making a cake. The mess was ridiculous - I'm pretty sure we first tried to clean it up with water and thus made tiny dough balls that stuck to everything - but the memory is amazing. So last night, as I was kneading and rolling and cutting out the biscuits I thought about all of this. About how awesome it is to be taken back to one's childhood, to make something tasty out of a few random ingredients, and how good it is to look forward to what's coming out of the oven.

Here's what came out!

Wanna make them yourself? Here you go:

Cheddar Rosemary Biscuits

Ingredients

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/3 cup chilled butter, cut into pieces
• 1/3 cup (1.3 ounces) shredded Cheddar cheese
• 2 tablespoons finely chopped red onion
• 2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh rosemary
• 1 cup 1% low-fat milk

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 425°.

2. Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl. Mix it all up. Cut in butter with a pastry blender or 2 knives until mixture resembles coarse meal. Stir in cheese, onion, and rosemary. Add milk to flour mixture; stir just until blended. Don't

overmix or biscuits will be like small stones instead of fluffy pillows of love.

3. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface; knead lightly 4 to 5 times. Pat or roll dough to a 1-inch thickness; cut with a 2 1/2-inch biscuit cutter (or a glass of appropriate size). Place biscuits 2 inches apart on a baking sheet coated with cooking spray. Coat tops of biscuits with cooking spray.

4. Bake at 425° for 15 minutes or until lightly browned. An undercooked biscuit is always better than an overcooked one.

Rosemary that made it through the winter in the garden

I'd say this is coarse meal-ish, wouldn't you?