Alyssa’s Cheddar & Trad Biscuits

Dan    Alyssa, Start From Scratch, Student Recipes     Alyssa, baking, beer, biscuits, Kick The KD, learning

What you’ll need…

1 3/4 cup unbleached flour

4 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup roasted pumpkin seeds

1 cup shredded cheddar

1/3 cup butter

1 cup of Big Rock Traditional Ale (or whatever brew you got going on in the fridge)

We were having turkey chilli for supper, so I thought what better opportunity to kill 2 birds with 1 stone by executing my variation of the “Grammy’s Grab ‘n’ Go Biscuits” recipe from class and have something traditional to go with the chili.

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees. Mix flour, baking powder, and salt together in a medium-sized bowl. Cut-in butter (with hands works best), until mixture appears ‘crumbly’, then add-in the cheddar cheese. Mix in the beer until a dough forms. Next, fold in pumpkin seeds.

On a floured surface, knead a few times, then cut into even portions and place onto a prepared baking sheet. Cook for 12-15 minutes in oven or until a toothpick comes out clean.

The reason for the beer instead of the milk was simply because I didn’t have any in the fridge, but I had some Big Rock Trad kicking around, so I thought, “why not?” They worked out just fine! It was also another great excuse for me to finish the some 100 ml left in the bottle…this may become my signature.

Yields 8 biscuits

Total cook time…25 min

The “biscuits” photo is my attempt at food photography, and the “model” is my boyfriend, great teamwork!

Sam I am Scones

Dan    Appetizers & Co., Recipes     baking, biscuits, Kick The KD, learning, quick and easy, tips

What you’ll need…

2 cups all-purpose flour

3 TSP baking powder

1/2 TSP salt

1/2 cup butter (the colder, the better!)

1/2 cup deli sliced ham (chopped)

1 cup milk

1/2 cup green peas

1 egg

ground black pepper

After having a very lovely guest, Julie Van Rosendaal, in my Kick The KD class last week, I felt inspired. In class, we had tackled the art of a perfect biscuit with the help of Julie. I, myself, am not much of a baker, but after spending some time with someone like her in the kitchen, it’s hard not to become impassioned!

If Dr. Seuss was alive and well today, I’d like to think that he would rather enjoy these scones, but if not, he might say something like…‘I would not, could not, eat those scones, even if I were just bones. I would not eat them anywhere. In this, or that, I do not care.’

Anyway…start by preheating the oven to 425 degrees. In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Next, cut-in the butter with your hands until the mixture is ‘crumbly’ (I found it easiest to cut the cold butter into small, 1/2″ cubes first, then mix it in). Once that’s done, add-in the ham and toss the dry mixture a few times to evenly disperse.

In a blender, combine the milk and green peas, puree until smooth. Add the blended liquid and egg into the bowl of dry ingredients. Mix until a wet dough forms. Place dough on a lightly floured surface and knead a couple times until no longer sticky.

Now, this is the part where I would say start tearing off pieces of dough in biscuit-appropriate sizes, but Julie showed us a much better option in class: Take the dough in it’s entirety and press down until it is about 1″ thick. Next, cut it as you would a pizza…in half, then quarters, then eighths. After that, you’ll have some nicely shaped triangles (rhombus need not apply).

Take each piece and evenly spread them out on a prepared baking sheet. Brush the top with some egg wash or even milk (another great tip from Julie!), finish with some ground black pepper and pop into the oven for 12 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Yields 8 biscuits

Total cook time…25 min

How easy was that? Seriously. Biscuits are so easy, and always delicious…Slathering with butter is strongly recommended!

Stacey: Week 5, Cooking for the Whole Fam-dam-ly

Dan    Stacey, Start From Scratch, The Participants, The Progress     calgary, cooking, Kick The KD, learning, Stacey, thoughts

This week’s homework assignment: What does the biscuit mean to you?

This week we were invited to explore biscuit making after learning from the best, Julie van Rosendaal, in class.  Julie helped us learn so much in our short class together and she helped make it possible to salvage the backwards biscuits (liquid goes in last...next time)!  Not only that, she was able to answer random baking questions (i.e. What’s the difference between baking soda and powder? Soda makes the dough expand, powder makes the dough rise) and manipulate recipes on the fly (less baking powder still does the trick without the metal-y taste).

So have I prefaced this enough for you to empathize with me when I tell you my biscuits were hardly comparable to the in-class ones?  I swear I did everything the same as in class, except not backwards, and except without the random improvements Julie was able to suggest along the way…  That being said, they still were yummy and they still took on a biscuit form!

I chose to recreate the blueberry + orange zest biscuit and a standard cheese biscuit.  They were not as flaky as I would have liked but warm from the oven they still made a terrific lunch!  Next time I’m not even sure what I could do different.  Perhaps Julie has just set my expectations too high and I will have to keep practicing them in order to get better.  That’s the best thing about these biscuits…they take no time at all to make and bake!  So easy in fact that you could feasibly have warm biscuits whenever the mood strikes you.

Another successful week in expanding my ability to impress dinner guests with cooking tricks!

–Stacey

Kira: Thoughts on Week 3 and 4

Dan    Kira, Start From Scratch, The Participants, The Progress     calgary, cooking, Kick The KD, Kira, learning, thoughts

I’m not so great at keeping things on time, but here’s some more pictures of food that I’ve made.

The pan and the cake are that raspberry pudding cake that was on my assigned blogger’s site. The blog I’ve been paired up with is Good Food, Good Wine and a Bad Girl. You can check her recipe here!

It was super tasty. Not too chocolaty and the raspberry was the perfect addition. This was gone in the matter of a couple days. It kept well in the fridge and tasted just fine re-heated.

I also made pancakes! They were vegan ones though, not Peter’s recipe. They have soy milk and no eggs. I added in some strawberries and the rest of the raspberries from the pudding cake.

The pancakes themselves were awesome and tasted like pancakes but, weirdly enough, they smelt like cooked corn on the cob. Tasted nothing like it, but I couldn’t get over how weird that was.

Finally, I tried that Steam Whistle risotto recipe, but didn’t take any pictures because it didn’t LOOK too tasty. Without the saffron, it was kind of a murky gray colour. I either used the wrong kind of rice or the rice was bad because I cooked it for a very long time and it was the right consistency but the rice came out crunchy. Hmmmm…In any case, the butter/cheese/chicken broth covered everything up and it was fairly tasty. My roommate liked it.

And that’s what I did thes last two weeks. Nummy.

–Kira

Steam Whistle, Some Beer-y Good Food

Dan    Start From Scratch, The Progress, Thoughts    

If you have ever met me, followed me on twitter, or just plain ol’ stalked on the street (yes, I’m talking to you Annie), you would know that I love Steam Whistle Pilsner. So, you can imagine my excitement when the company came on board as a sponsor for Kick The KD.

Not only were they more than happy to take part and supply us with some ‘cooking’ beer (ok, we drank a couple…), but they also wanted to feature any of the participants’ original recipes on their website. How awesome is that? The basis of this program has always been to encourage and inspire, so, what better way to encourage a university student than with beer? I stand by this generalization.

I scoured their extensive beer-based recipe database for some Kick The KD appropriate dishes and decided on…Cran-beery Meatballs, Roundhouse Risotto, and Date and Nut Beer Cake.

First up: Cran-Beery Meatballs. I thought this would be an excellent choice because some solid meatball skills are transferable to other culinary fields such as hamburger construction or meatloaf-making. I think the highlight for myself, personally, was watching how squeamish some of the girls were having to mix the meatballs by hand (You can see Rand mixing away in the photo above). I kept reminding them: ‘Such is the life of a culinary-inclined socialite.’

The meatballs were fantastic. (note: we substituted 1 cup of chopped dried cranberries and extra liquid instead of a can of cranberry sauce. More real, more flavour!)

Next on our list: Roundhouse Risotto!  Risotto is always on that high, intimidating horse called ‘Fancy’ so I thought knocking it down a few pegs by adding some beer would help make it more approachable for the Kick The Kd-ers. I was hoping it would help open up everyone’s eyes and show them that you don’t need a skillful hand for risotto, just patience…lots and lots of patience.

In lieu of patience, I found that a group of 15 participants taking ‘shifts’ to stir the risotto/add broth became instrumental to its success ( That’s Stacey and Kat keeping a watchful eye). Let’s face it, it’s pretty hard to not get distracted while stirring for half an hour…is that a butterfly? I’ll be right back…

The risotto turned out perfectly as well. Everyone had seconds (at least). So far, so good! One more recipe left…

Sadly, Date and Nut Beer Cake could not be with us today because it did not turn out as well as we had hoped. I think our main FAIL (as kids these days would say) was not using a bundt pan, which, I admit, was completely my fault, but, hey, everyone makes mistakes! The cake baked well over it’s allotted baking time and was still uncooked in the middle when we pulled it out of the oven. On the plus side, the cooked parts of it were absolutely delicious. Every last (cooked) bit of it was eaten up in no time.

So, a life lesson for Dan: Your spring form cake pan is not appropriate for all cake recipes. I stand corrected. Never again.

Last, but not least, we had a very special guest at our beer-based Kick The KD class this week. None other than Charcut’s beer sommelier, Kirk! This fine gentleman came down to chat with us about food and beer pairings. He shared his extensive knowledge of brews near and far with the class as we tasted different types of beer with each dish. It was definitely the cherry on top of our already awesome sunday. On his website, Kirk writes about all things beer.

You can follow him on twitter too. @beersnsuch

Check back here soon for some more Kick The KD updates! Only five classes left!

Stacey: Coq au Steam Whistle Bière Nachos

Dan    Stacey, Start From Scratch, Student Recipes, The Participants     awesome, beer, calgary, cooking, Kick The KD, learning, recipes, Stacey, Steam Whistle, thoughts

What you’ll need…

2 boneless chicken breasts

1 bottle Steam Whistle Pilsner

spice to taste (eg: chili pepper, Montreal chicken spice, etc…)

1 bag tortilla chips

1 roma tomato (diced)

1/3 cup green onions (finely chopped)

1/2 cup pickled jalapeno peppers (sliced)

2 cloves garlic (finely chopped)

2 cups shredded cheese (mozza, cheddar, marble, etc…)

Combine chicken breasts, spices, and Steam Whistle in small pot, or deep baking dish, in oven, preheated to 350 degrees. Let cook for 20 minutes, or until chicken is cooked through. Remove from oven, let cool, and chop into bite-sized pieces (Slap Chop!).

Next, place tortilla chips on a baking tray, then chicken pieces, and layer in order of listed ingredients. Bake in oven on low broil until cheese has melted, about 6-8 minutes.

As you can see, this was very easy, yet perfect for a weekend snack!

Serves 4-5

Total cook time…35 min