A quick and easy dip or spread made with canned salmon, some cream cheese (light would be okay), a little butter to help smooth it, lemon juice, Kalamata olives and a bit of anchovies to give it some flavor depth. Serve with baguette slices or crackers.

The basis for this recipe came from The Wednesday Chef blog, way back in 2008. Luisa made this, but hers was with tuna. Now, I have canned tuna, but it’s really expensive stuff that I have shipped a couple of times a year from Washington, young tuna that don’t contain so much mercury, and I just didn’t feel like using my pricey can of tuna on this in case I didn’t like it. I needn’t have worried – I loved it, and I’d guess the tuna version would be just as tasty as the salmon one. I have 6-ounce cans of salmon too – from the same purveyor – but I don’t seem to use the canned salmon very often, so for this I decided to try the salmon.

This pate – or tapenade – that’s what Luisa recipe called it – named so probably because it has olives in it, and tapenades DO contain mostly olives. This concoction isn’t olive-centric – it’s salmon and cream cheese centric, but with all these other added flavors that do everything to enhance the salmon. Things like lemon juice, the anchovies, lemon juice, pepper and the butter. There is a short discussion on Luisa’s blog about leaving out the butter – the original recipe (click on the blog link above if you’d like to make Luisa’s version) called for more butter, more anchovies, more olives too (and the recipe didn’t specify Kalamata, just “black olives,” but I just couldn’t quite see a ripe black olive doing a thing for this mixture). I keep pitted Kalamata olives in my refrigerator at all times. And I buy a little bitty jar of anchovies once or twice a year – I buy the most expensive one I can find at my local Italian deli – and use a few, then refrigerate it. It keeps nigh on forever as long as it’s covered in olive oil. I thought the butter was needed, but I didn’t use as much as the original called for.

Everything except the chives is whizzed up in the food processor until it’s super-smooth, then spooned into ramekins, or some kind of serving bowls. The recipe makes about 3 ramekins worth. The recipe indicates you can use it right away, but I think the flavor is better once it chills overnight. Besides, it’s something you can make the day before a dinner party if that’s what you’re making it for. This recipe makes quite a bit, and it’s rather difficult to make half a recipe, what with salmon or tuna cans at about 6 ounces. IF you have some leftover tuna or salmon, by all means make a half a recipe!

When I made it we were having dinner guests, so I toasted a baguette slices for it, but this would be just dandy with crackers, or toast for that matter. It’s probably fine with celery sticks too. Sprinkle chopped chives on top if you have them – don’t go buy chives just to put on it – some minced parsley would be fine. Even some fresh dill would work too.

What’s GOOD: I loved the stuff – but it does have a definite fishy taste – a good kind of fishy taste if you get my drift. The anchovies add depth of flavor and you really can’t taste them. I used ample lemon juice which was really good in it. It’s also EASY!
What’s NOT: nothing whatsoever. I’d definitely make this again.

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Need a new idea for pork tenderloin? That pork tenderloin that is such a lean piece of meat which doesn’t have all that much flavor to start or to end with, but is redeemed if it’s baked to a deep pink and served with a nice sauce?

What you’ll need to make this pork dish is a whole lotta mushrooms. About a pound, give or take. One of the really interesting things Phillis Carey did during the class where this was prepared, was show us 2 piles of mushrooms – one was shiitake and one button. They were approximately equal size – the piles – but one weighed half as much as the other. If you’ve ever picked up shiitakes and considered their weight, well, they’re quite light. Since they’re so darned expensive it’s really helpful that you use half as much weight of them as the button mushrooms. The shiitakes not only add flavor, but a very different texture to this sauce, so do seek them out.

The pork tenderloin must be trimmed well – of any visible fat. Well, not every speck, but at least remove as much as possible. And most often the tenderloins have a layer of silverskin on one side and end which should be removed. Not only is it tough and not really edible, but it’s presence means the pork won’t pick up any particular flavoring. Even though you may brown it, that caramelization (Maillard effect) won’t be effective if silverskin is in the way. So do take the time with a small and very sharp paring knife and cut away that silverskin.

Once it’s trimmed and ready, put it on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Or use a Silpat if you have one. Once you put the tenderloin in the oven you’re about 25 minutes from being ready to slice and serve the meat, so have the sauce ingredients all prepped before you start. Don’t start cleaning mushrooms after you’ve put the meat in the oven, okay? And do have the rest of your dinner all ready to go – the pork will need to rest for a few minutes, but it will hold the heat and re-absorb all those good juices.

Meanwhile, whip up the sauce. Clean the mushrooms – I keep hearing some experts say that mushrooms don’t absorb much, if any, water if you wash them. Phillis absolutely says wipe them with a paper towel – her perspective is that all mushrooms we buy at grocery stores are raised in indoor beds anyway, so all we’re wiping off is the specialized (almost fake) soil. It’s not like dirt from your backyard. And she definitely feels that mushrooms absorb liquid because she watches how much longer it takes to cook out any fluid in them. So anyway, whichever way you clean them, slice them up. Melt butter, cook the mushrooms until all that liquid has evaporated, then add wine. Chicken broth is next, the little bit of cream (well, 1/2 cup!) and bourbon.

Bourbon – well – it has a kind of earthiness to the flavor – if you’re not a fan, use brandy instead. But this sauce was really nice with bourbon, I must say. Most of the liquor is added in during the cooking, but one more T. is added at the end to give a little jolt of extra flavor.

Once the pork is ready, slice on the diagonal – take a look at the grain of the pork – it sort of curves like wrapping around on the diagonal . . . you want to slice it across that grain if possible. Serve with the sauce.

What’s GOOD: how easy this meal is to put together – and it’s very worthy of a company dinner, but easy enough for a weeknight dinner too. Loved the sauce and the heft of it. Full of flavor.

What’s NOT: really nothing at all.

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By chance do you still have some ham in your freezer or refrigerator left over from Easter? And you really need to make a tasty but healthy soup for a weeknight?

What I had was a big honkin’ ham bone, and some black lentils. I had those whole, round urad dal kind of black lentils that I bought at an Indian market. They needed to be used up anyway, so was glad for an opportunity. After doing a recipe search, I found one at the Food Network that would work with a few adaptations. This soup came together in a hurry, actually, although you do need to take the time to cook the beans. I used my handy-dandy Bean Cooking Chart to tell me how long to cook the beans [Urad Lentils (whole), 25-30 minutes] in the traditional way (i.e. not pressure cooker or slow cooker this time as I wanted the beans to soak up that ham flavor).

First I removed all the meat from the ham bone and stuck it back in the refrigerator. Into a big pot I briefly cooked some onion, celery, pancetta and bacon for awhile. Then I added the bone and broth (I used a pork broth, but chicken is fine) lentils and spices. Simmered that for about 20 minutes or so, then I added in some carrots and cooked the mixture further (about 10+ minutes because I wanted the carrots to be just barely tender and bright colored). I removed the ham bone, pulled off any further ham I could from it. Tasted it for seasoning and added in the ham cubes I’d removed at the beginning. It was VERY tasty – hearty, heart-warming. Freezes well too.

What’s GOOD: Healthy, hearty, stick to the ribs kind of taste. Delicious. Loved the thyme in it – but then I’m a fan of thyme anyway. After a couple of days it was even more tasty and I added water to thin it out some.

What’s NOT: Nothing at all.

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Chicken breasts stuffed with Black Forest ham and Swiss cheese, rolled in a very light breading of crumbs, flour and Parm, plus seasonings. They’re baked (no browning required) then served with a really, really tasty mushroom lemon sauce. Love the sauce!

Looking for an easy chicken entrée that would be great for guests? This recipe absolutely works – it’s just boneless, skinless chicken breasts (use smaller sized breasts if you can find them), pounded thin, rolled up with the ham and cheese, gently rolled into the breading mixture and baked for about 30+ minutes. You can make the chicken rolls ahead of time (a few hours anyway) and have everything else ready to go. The sauce doesn’t require the browned bits from browning the chicken because you don’t HAVE to brown the chicken ahead of time (easy!) and the simple creamy lemon mushroom sauce gets spooned over the sliced chicken pieces. All of it relatively easy to make and it will come together quickly if you have everything prepped ahead. The sauce could even be made the day before, but I think it would be best made just before serving – that way the mushrooms will still have perfect texture.

This recipe came from a cooking class with Phillis Carey, and she mentioned that the sauce is also really good on salmon and even on left over chicken. I think the sauce would be good on a whole LOT of things – I just loved the lemony flavor in it.

What’s GOOD: how easy it is. How moist the chicken is and ever-so tasty with the mushroom lemon sauce. Lovely company meal – looks pretty besides having great taste.

What’s NOT: nothing at all. Just do the prep ahead of time.

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Suffice to say, I have a big house. And hard as I try, sometimes I don’t get to all of my magazines in a timely manner. Ah-hem. We had to clean out a big bookcase a few days ago. We had some kind of a dead critter we could smell, but couldn’t ever find, darn it, and did a whole lot of work trying to locate the source of the smell . . finally after about 10 days the smell went away. We suppose the critter was in the walls somewhere. Meanwhile, in this said bookcase we were convinced the critter had to be newly dead and decaying under (answer: no), I found about five 2007 Gourmet magazines. Geez – that was 6 years ago! They’d gotten tucked into a shelf and forgotten. So I’ve been trying to catch up with those first. And I ran across this very interesting set of statistics. They’re old numbers – I actually tried to find out some of these statistics based on 2012 numbers, but they weren’t readily available, even on the internet!

Number of broiler chickens produced in the US in 1955: 1.1 billion

Number of broiler chickens produced in the US in 2005: 9 billion (I did find this number for 2008 and it was 9.8 billion)

Number of weeks it took for a broiler to reach market weight (around 6 pounds) in the 1950’s: 17

Number of weeks it took for a broiler to reach that same market weight in 2006: 6. (No kidding? No wonder chicken farmers like using growth hormones!)

Estimated number of pounds of chicken consumed per American in 1975: 39

Estimated number of pounds of chicken consumed per American in 2006: 88

Approximate number of chickens processed per hour in the nation’s largest slaughterhouses: 25,000

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I forget about making vegetarian (well, almost vegetarian) meals on any routine basis. I do a sort of a rotation of chicken, pork, some beef, a little bit of fish, and then it’s back to chicken, pork, etc. So when Phillis Carey made this dish at a recent cooking class, it just reminded me that I need to do this kind of meal more often.

A little backtracking . . . after about 9 months of diagnosing, chemo, healing then radiation for my friend Cherrie’s breast cancer, she’s just beginning to come out of the fatigue caused by the radiation (and the chemo too). Her oncologist told her to expect fairly extreme fatigue for 6 weeks at least after her last radiation treatment. She’s at 4 weeks now and she says she’s maybe feeling a glimmer of more energy. Not much, but even a little bit is good. So she suggested we go to a cooking class (a night class) which could be problematical for her since she often falls asleep at about 7-8pm. Sure enough, she started to nod off a couple of times, she told me. But not before we had 4 really tasty dishes at the class.

Phillis has a vegan son, and she’s actually teaching some vegan classes in San Diego, since she’s begun trying to find tasty dishes she can fix for him when he comes home to visit. This is one, although she does make it strictly vegetarian/vegan for him. Meaning no dairy, no prosciutto, no chicken broth, no butter.

This recipe DOES contain butter, prosciutto, cream (just a little tiny bit) and chicken broth, so you can pick and choose what you’d like to include or substitute. The dish is a two-step process – and they both come together in nearly the same amount of time. Start the mushrooms first, then get all the ingredients ready for the polenta. The latter takes about 7-9 minutes once the water and broth are at the boil. You want to serve this as soon as the polenta is done – once it sits it starts to firm up, and this is a dish to utilize soft, creamy (although there isn’t any cream or milk in it) polenta.

Prosciutto (chopped into small pieces from the thinly sliced type) is briefly cooked in olive oil, then removed and allowed to drain on paper towels until later. Butter is added to the pan and you cook the shallots and garlic, then the mushrooms (a mixture of shiitake, crimini or Portobello and button). After the mushrooms have released all their juices and it’s almost all simmered away you add the herbs, chicken broth and the little jot of heavy cream. Once they’ve cooked completely you add the parsley and Parm. Done.

Meanwhile you’ve made the polenta. Phillis always uses the Albers brand of regular cornmeal, not the pricey polenta grain. Once cooked she feels it makes little difference anyway. The dry meal is whisked slowly into boiling broth and allowed to simmer, with you stirring it very often, until it’s reached the right consistency. Then you add in some defrosted corn. Spoon it into bowls while it’s piping hot, then spoon the mushroom sauce on top and serve immediately! You can also add some Parm on top when you serve it.

What’s GOOD: all the flavors and textures going on in the bowl. This is comfort food for sure. The polenta is smooth and unctuous with the little bit of corn in it. The mushrooms are very tasty and have a toothsomeness to them. Altogether good, and not unhealthy, although there is a little butter and cream in it.

What’s NOT: nothing at all. If you’re a fiend for mushrooms make more of the sauce, as there isn’t all that much to divide onto 6 servings.

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When you say a sauce is a Béchamel, it conjures up a fancy something-or-other. This sauce is anything BUT fancy. It’s a simple butter-flour-milk gravy with the only added ingredient being some tomato paste. Claude Monet called it a Tomato Sauce, but I’ve re-named it.

When I went to my account at Eat Your Books, I put in “tomato sauce” and began perusing through the dozens and dozens of them from all my cookbooks – looking first at the list of ingredients. There’s no quantity, just the major items named. I looked at Italian style sauces mostly, since I wanted to put something on the eggplant rollatini you see above. After I’d studied about 20 or so (with the usual list of ingredients like onion, garlic, fresh or canned tomatoes, basil, parsley) this one stuck out because of its lack of canned tomatoes and because of the milk. A plain tomato sauce from canned tomatoes just sounded so blah to me – or something that might easily overwhelm the subtle cheeses in the rollatini.

You didn’t ask for a history lesson about Claude Monet, but you’re going to have one anyway, since he was quite a foodie. Years ago I purchased the book Monet’s Table : The Cooking Journals of Claude Monet, and eventually found the companion book, Monet’s Cookery Notebooks both written or compiled by Claire Joyes. I’m embarrassed to tell you that until now I’d never cooked anything from it. The first book (above) is mostly lavish photographs of the property and his paintings with stories about the entertaining Monet and his family did at Giverny, his home for so many years. The 2nd book has more stories and photographs of the interior of Giverny, and recipes (not all that many). He shared the home with his 2nd wife and his mistress, who was married to another man (Monet supported her and her family – husband and children – for many years – most likely so he could have this other woman [Monet’s mistress Alice], by his side). I’ve read several books about Monet or the Impressionists, including  Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet. I really liked that one. The other one about Renoir was Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland.

Monet was always interested in food – and even when he and his first wife Camille (who died very young, soon after their 2nd child was born) were nearly destitute and living in a hovel in Paris, they would not only have food, but they’d share it with others – mostly other starving artists like he was. He didn’t become famous until some years later – after his wife had died. He caused a huge stir by painting Camille on her deathbed – not when she was alive, but once she had passed. He was inordinately proud of that painting. That kind of thing simply wasn’t done back then. He kept the painting nearby for the remainder of his life, even after he remarried. Once a few of his paintings sold he was finally able to buy a home, first in Paris, then later outside Paris and he spent nearly all of his remaining years at Giverny. Monet didn’t cook at all – or nearly so – but he was passionate about food, which is why there are recipes attributed to him. Maintaining a nice home with servants was just part of his history – if you were a gentleman in that time, you just did. Once he established himself at Giverny he had enough wealth to have servants. He made most of the decisions in the family about what they would eat and when. The Cookery Notebooks book is filled with recipes, and more stories about the entertaining style. Monet was well-traveled and he fell in love with food in many places he visited. Likely he served dishes that were sometimes unfashionable only because they were not French or even known to most French.

Being a fan of the Impressionists in general, I have always liked Monet’s paintings. Dave and I have sought out his paintings in museums around the world – in addition to most of the other Impressionists too. The most notable was a small room at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, where they house 43 Renoirs. We were on a tour of the museum and the guide, a very dour young woman, gave us 20 minutes to see the entire room. Most of us were very unhappy about that! But they would not allow us to linger longer than that.

For many years I had this van Gogh painting hanging in my house. A very, VERY cheap copy of it. It was the only picture in my daughter’s bedroom when she was a baby. There weren’t many baby-oriented wall decorations back then, and I used it because of the yellow color scheme I did in her bedroom.

So now, let’s get back to this tomato sauce, huh? There was nothing to it – making it – I melted some unsalted butter, added some flour, stirred and cooked that for a minute or two, then poured in whole milk that I’d heated just to boiling. The sauce thickened almost immediately. I seasoned it with salt and pepper, then added some tomato paste out of the tube I have in the refrigerator. I did this half an hour before I was going to plate our dinner, so all I had to do was re-heat it on the range and add some chopped up tomato. The fresh tomato in and on top was not in Monet’s recipe, but I really did think it needed a little spark of color. I had some vine-ripened tomatoes which worked perfectly.

What’s GOOD: it was very easy to make. This sauce isn’t a sauce for pasta – it doesn’t have enough heft, in my opinion, but was perfect for the nuanced eggplant. It would be nice on cooked vegetables, on fish. You could put some cheese in it – like Gruyere or Parm and give it some different flavors. It wasn’t anything extra special, but it fit my need perfectly.

What’s NOT: no problems or dislikes.

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Fried pork chops. Yes! They’re marinated in a buttermilk mixture, then dipped into panko crumbs, then fried ever-so-briefly in canola oil for 2-3 minutes per side and these are DONE!

I don’t fry meat very much. I don’t really fry chicken, although I did make that once and post about it here. I don’t fry fish at all. I don’t fry much of anything – sauté in a little oil, yes, but these are almost – but not quite – deep fried. What I had were thin-sliced pork chops, and didn’t really know what to do with them. Usually I have thick-sliced pork chops, but no, these were truly thin. I searched on the internet – I was sure I’d seen a recipe recently for thin pork chops, or watched some show about it, but couldn’t find a record of it. My online search for it didn’t result in much. Then I modified the search and found this recipe from The Hungry Mouse blog, which was just wonderful!

First the meat was trimmed of most visible fat – if you don’t, you’ll have all those edges with big bites of gloopy fat and that I didn’t want. The chops I had did have a thick edge of fat which I trimmed off almost completely. In a small plastic bag I combined an egg (I made half of the below recipe for 2 large, but thin pork chops), buttermilk, garlic powder, salt, black pepper. I did not have dried parsley, and fresh parsley would have burned, so I added in some dried sage instead. The meat was squished around with the marinade a bit and I let it sit for about 30 minutes or so.

Meanwhile, I’d prepared another plastic bag with nothing but 1/2 cup of panko crumbs in it. Once the rest of my dinner was ready – you DO want to have everything else ready before you start this because it comes together in a hurry – I heated canola oil (I didn’t have pure olive oil as recommended in the recipe) in a frying pan that was about 8 or 9 inches across. Big enough to hold the 2 pork chops with just a little bit of wiggle room. Just remember when you add oil to the pan, use less than you think, because the pork chops will displace the oil. The oil reached the top of the chops barely – not covered it – but just to the top edge, so I used too much.

Briefly drain – just by holding each chop out of the marinade – then one by one add them to the panko bag and hold the top tight while you toss the bag some. The panko will just perfectly cling to the egg-buttermilk marinade. As I finished that the chop went directly into the hot oil. The recipe said not to fry these unless the meat caused bubbling, so I did exactly as suggested – I dipped one edge of the chop into the oil – it bubbled nicely, so gently I slipped it into the oil. Then I repeated it for the second chop. I didn’t time it – 2-3 minutes per side is what it said. Very gently with Teflon-coated tongs I lifted up one corner of a chop to see if it was golden brown. Yup! Also very carefully, I lifted and turned each one. When you turn them over they’ll bubble up furiously, so it was time to turn down the heat. Way down, actually. I thought they were going to burn, but they didn’t. Another 2-3 minutes per side and they were done. I drained them very, very briefly on paper towels and served alongside some asparagus tossed with lemon juice and little butter, a green salad with veggies and a big honkin’ biscuit you read about a few days ago, Paradise Biscuits. Delish.

What’s GOOD: how quick they were to make. Nice flavoring, tender – amazing when you consider they only cooked 2-3 minutes per side. They might have been nice with some kind of sauce, but I didn’t have any, so they were served plain. If I’d had my druthers, I’d have served them with mashed potatoes and gravy, probably, but I almost never make that kind of meal!

What’s NOT: well, these probably aren’t all that healthy, but the experts say that if you do fry food, if the heat is kept consistently at a fairly high temp (over 375°) the meat and coating will absorb barely any of the oil. With the panko, I suppose it did take some, but believe it or not, these were not greasy.

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There isn’t any cream in this, but because the dressing emulsifies, it just looks like it contains cream or sour cream or something dairy. Except for an egg – a raw egg. It does contain peanut oil and olive oil and the acid is from red wine vinegar.

Every so often I get a yen to try a different salad dressing. Nearly every time I do, I revert back to my favorites, but I get tired of the similar flavors in them (garlic, Parm and usually a little bit of blue cheese). So I venture away as I did this time with something unusual. I found the original recipe in a favorite cookbook of mine, A Cook’s Tour of Sonoma by Michele Jordan. Her version contained one thing I didn’t want – green olives – so I substituted capers. And I used extra virgin olive oil – instead of the pure olive oil. I also added garlic – just because I like it. About the oil – I used extra virgin because I don’t HAVE any pure olive oil. I should, but my goodness, I don’t know about you, but I have bottles and bottles of different kinds of oils in my pantry. Way too many, and I rarely use the pure olive oil. The author has a revised edition of the book available too – The New Cook’s Tour of Sonoma which I understand from reading about it, contains a lot more touring information – food purveyors, tours about food, cheese, etc.

To make this, you just start adding ingredients to the blender. This recipe (in its original form) came from a restaurant in Santa Rosa, and was enough quantity to feed about 100 people. My recipe software easily scaled it down and I have about 1 1/2 or 2 cups of dressing which must be used within 3 weeks. Reason? It contains raw egg. The original actually called for one egg, and I truly didn’t know what I’d do with part of a raw egg, so I just used a whole (very small) egg for the quantity I made. It has in it some Dijon, Worcestershire, soy sauce (so you don’t need any salt) and a bunch of dried herbs – but all in very small amounts. Oh yes, it has a tiny pinch of curry powder in it too. I love that hint – if you didn’t know it was there I don’t think you could taste it. Then you slowly pour in the peanut oil, olive oil and lastly the red wine vinegar and it’s done. Other than gathering up all the herb and spice jars, it took little time to make.

If time permits, do let it sit out (in a sealed jar) for several hours to let the flavors marry before you use it to dress a salad, or pour over some spring asparagus. It would also work over cooked pasta (as a salad, not an entrée). I did let it sit out for awhile, then put it in the refrigerator for several more hours before I used it on the green salad you see above.

What’s GOOD: it’s easy to make, it’s creamy, and full of all kinds of interesting herb flavors. Love the miniscule hint of curry powder in it (you could easily eliminate that if you don’t like curry). It’s definitely different! We both liked it very much.
What’s NOT: it does contain raw egg – I don’t have a problem with that, but many people do. It also – because of the egg – doesn’t keep as long – the author recommended no longer than 3 weeks.

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Can you vaguely see the indentations that I made before I baked these 6 gigantic biscuits, so I could more easily pull them apart? Healthy these are not. Delicious, yes they are!

Biscuits. What’s there not to like, other than the fact that they’re white food, high in carbs, pretty much empty calories (i.e. no healthy nutritional value) and high in calorie. But oh well, sometimes there’s just nothing like them. When we want comfort food, isn’t that what we turn to, things that may not be good for us, but they taste good and they just plain make you “feel” better. Kind of like ice cream. And mashed potatoes. Even meatloaf satisfies my comfort meter.

I was going to cook up some barley for dinner, but I got a little flash in my brain that said biscuits sounded a whole lot better. I have a digital cookbook in my MasterCook recipe program that is just filled with internet-found ideas.  They’re sorted by category, so it took little time to scan through all the Bread possibilities (which also included some quick sweet breads). The recipe has been in that file for awhile, but has a story.

Apparently there used to be a restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky, called Lynn’s Paradise Café, and the owner, Lynn, made these glorious biscuits. The restaurant closed, but the owner gave the recipe to someone, and it’s available in a couple of places online. These biscuits are big. I mean HUGE. Usually they’re made in a 9×9 pan – and the recipe below IS for that size. I didn’t want 9 of these gigantic biscuits, so I made 2/3 of the recipe and used a bread pan instead. We ate 2 and I froze the other 4 1/2 in foil so I can pop them out for a future dinner.

At the Louisville Courier’s website their recipe calls for White Lily flour (not easily found out here in the Wild West, although I have read even recently that some cooks believe White Lily is absolutely the best flour – I wouldn’t know since I’ve never tried it) and shortening. Theirs were baked at 425°. I used regular all-purpose flour and unsalted butter. And baked them at 400°. They’re a buttermilk biscuit, but rich with unsalted butter AND heavy cream. Yes. So they’re tender from the buttermilk, flaky from the unsalted butter you cut in, and rich with the heavy cream. Technically you shouldn’t need butter on them. I’ll leave that up to you.

My opinion is that perhaps these biscuits could/would be just fine with a bit less fat. The next time I make these I’m going to use all buttermilk, and no cream. Or maybe a higher proportion of buttermilk to cream. I’ll let you know how that works. I suppose I could hold off posting this recipe until I’ve tried it, but since this one below isn’t my recipe, I’ll let you decide whether to try these as is, or wait until such time as I get around to trying a revised recipe.

What’s GOOD: the biscuits are tall, no, they’re deep and extraordinarily rich. Not like a scone – just like a rich biscuit. I think I’d like them not quite so high, yet I don’t have a pan that would be just right for that. I’ll have to think on that. The texture is rich. Not flaky, not exactly dense either. Good texture, buttery texture for sure! It’s possible the substitution of butter for shortening has an effect also. Maybe I should try them with the non-hydrogenated shortening I have. The biscuits don’t need any butter, but if you take a big mouthful, they might be a bit too dry without something on them – gravy, jam, honey or gosh, butter! I splurged and had butter on the very last bite of the half a biscuit I ate. They’re also easy to make – the usual drill with dry ingredients, cut in the fat (butter or shortening) then pour in the wet ingredients. Stir and press lightly into the pan. You hardly have to get your hands dirty!
What’s NOT: they do take awhile to bake – longer than ordinary biscuits since they’re SO thick.

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