I'm new to the blogging thing, and along with it, the twittering thing. Seriously, I feel like somebody's Grandma, new to the internets. But through the twittering thing, because we both use office supplies in the kitchen, I found On Blank. I actually just looked at it for real for the first time yesterday, and it's awesome. It's about food made of food, and about freezing things. It looks like we have a lot in common, but she's more hardcore than I am - like, she goes on about how it's not a big deal to make your own bread. (um, it IS a big deal. Sure we should do it, but it's a thing. It takes time. You do it wrong, and you've lost all that time and have no bread.) But anyhow, her blog looks awesome, and so when looking for dinner ideas today, I came across her herb and cheese biscuits.
I've made cheddar herb biscuits, but it's been a while. So I figured I'd start with the chicken.
This is one defrosted chicken breast, rubbed with aleppo peppers (use cayenne, it's fine), onion powder, garlic powder and paprika.
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| i bought the aleppo peppers at the Spice Corner long enough ago that they shouldn't still be flavorful, but they are. |
This is a quarter cup of bottled bbq sauce, and two tablespoons white vinegar, to thin it out and make sure it didn't get too sweet if I let it cook a while. I'd like to have made my own sauce, it's not hard to make bbq sauce, and when you do, it tastes like how you want it to taste, rather than however Trader Joe's wants it to taste, but I can't open a can of tomato sauce to use a few tablespoons, and all the homemade "tomato sauce" in my freezer is actually "pasta sauce" with flavors in it that aren't bbq-oriented.
This is that chicken breast, after 30 minutes at 350. This is also an Ove Glove. I'm a fan.
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| the ove glove is the best mitt I've ever used, until the one day it wears out, and you grab a dish and you are FULLY AWARE that it has worn out. I'm on my third glove. |
I pulled the chicken apart using two forks in opposite directions.
And threw it into the sauce on low.
Until it looked like this. It was a school night, which means I started cooking at 7, deluded into thinking Brian would be home soon, and in fact he got home closer to 10, so the chicken inadvertently had a long time to simmer in the sauce. I'm sure that helped, but I intended to only cook it in the sauce for 20 minutes and it would have been fine that way.
Then I made biscuits. Recipe here. It called for parsley, which I didn't have, but I had a lot of scallions left over from this. I went off script and added half a tablespoon of onion powder at this point - I wish I'd added more. I mixed all the dry goods together and then went for the cheese.
The recipe called for 3oz of cheddar, but I only had about 2oz, so I threw in a Laughing Cow wedge.
And mixed it all together with cut up butter, and made lumps out of it. It was really thick, so I used a combination of a spoon and my hand to make this happen. I made one tray of big samich-style biscuits and one of smaller ones to freeze.
Baked them about 20 minutes until they looked magical. All craggy and golden. I'm bad at timing, or at least, I think it takes Brian 10 minutes to get home, when in fact it takes 40, so I left these in the oven (turned off) for quite some time and they didn't lose anything, so you can keep them warm without worry.
And cut them in half to make chicken samiches.
This made four huge biscuits, perfect for a smallish samich, and six small ones, good for a side dish, which I froze. The original recipe called for a lot of parsley, which I didn't have, and I think my sprinkling of onion powder didn't give it the punch it was missing, so I'd suggest going a bit crazier on the herbs. The texture, however, was phenomenal.
I'm glad I added the Laughing Cow, but I wouldn't tell you to run out and buy cheese spread to make biscuits with - I think the texture would be just as awesome if you made the recipe as written - but I wouldn't be opposed to trading a dab of the butter and a bit of the cheddar for some cream cheese next time, if I had it handy.