Raiding the larder of ideas.

What one family eats, plans to eat, dreams of eating. Plus, other food and kitchen-related stuff from the home of steak-and-potatoes, pie and fresh green beans from the garden.

Tuesday, January 07, 2014

Gluten-Free Zesty Buttermilk Drop Biscuits

It really hurts when you watch those ads for breakfast at some establishment where they slather butter on a tasty, fluffy biscuit and then turn it into a breakfast sandwich, and then you remember that you can't eat wheat. Because sometimes, you just need a biscuit.  And I'm not really a big fan of the flavor of those normally produced by gluten-free mixes, but I also haven't yet found my own mix of flours I like for the texture.  

Until I remembered the rule I learned from my painting instructor in college, o, so many years ago: never use paint straight from the tube.

Adapting it to the kitchen: don't use a mix straight from the cupboard. Make it your own. And I had another mix on the shelf, the powder for ranch dressing (sometimes I make my own, but I was lacking ambition, at the end of a long day of moving furniture to make way for my soon-to-arrive gargantuan bed frame). So, I put two and two together and made dinner.

I had a large pot of my Philly Fish Chowder, and I completed it with these:








And there were enough left over for me to have one for breakfast. Just one. I'm the only one here, right now, too.

Gluten-Free Zesty Buttermilk Drop Biscuits

Ingredients:

2 cups Bob's Red Mill Biscuit & Baking Mix
1 Tablespoon dry buttermilk powder
1 Tablespoon powdered ranch dressing mix
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
1 1/2 cups lowfat milk (or more, if the dough seems too heavy)

1/2 cup butter for pan

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350° F.

Using a pastry blender or fork, work butter into dry ingredients until it has the consistency of coarse cornmeal.

Place butter in 9x13" baking pan, put in oven to heat up.

Stir in milk until completely mixed into a sticky dough.

Remove pan from oven, make sure butter covers bottom of pan. Drop biscuit dough by heaping tablespoons into the pan.

Bake for 20 to 22 minutes, until beginning to turn golden brown. Turn off oven, allow to cool a minute or two in pan, to allow the biscuits to absorb the remaining butter.

Serve warm.