good biscuits

the hippie has a theory that a woman can't make good biscuits until she is like 35 or has at least one kid. and you know, i think he is right. only in the last 2 months have i finally gotten the hang of The Biscuit. and damn, dude--my biscuits are the bomb now.

of course, this comes on the heels of learning how bad all the things in biscuits are for me. crisco, one of the major food groups in the South, is just TERRIBLE. nothing but pure trans fats. so now i am trying all kinds of shit to avoid crisco in the Southern Cooking that i do. not that i cook in a traditional southern way all that often, but still... so i have been doing things like making fried chicken with olive oil. and it's pretty good. but you can't make a good biscuit without some solid fat in there--the choices are a) butter, which is pretty bad, b) lard, the mere mentioning of which causes the bulk of the population of america to burst into flames, and c) crisco, which SOUNDS better because it is made of vegetable matter, but which is actually the worst one of all, contatining nothing but nasty bad evil trans fats. the bottom line: biscuits are bad for you. (note that in my list of solid fats, margarine is not listed--margarine is food of the devil, both vile and evil, and is not allowed in my house. that is why it is not an option for my biscuits.)

to make matters worse, the best thing to eat on a biscuit is honey butter. but i can get by on some homemade peach preserves if i gotta.

but here is what i think about all this. some foods that are too good to resist are just bad for you. i think you just have to get over it. the key is to limit yourself as to how much and how often you eat them, right? when i was a kid, there were ALWAYS biscuits. now, i make biscuits like 4 times a year. and god knows, i make some other bad for you things that would make my minions cry if i stopped: chocolate pudding (with half a cup of heavy whipping cream in every serving), fried chicken (with the skin ON), homemade macaroni and cheese (with like 4 kinds of cheese and cream in it), chicken and cheese enchiladas (we call them fat bombs, even as they are being consumed at an alarming rate). i just don't make these things all the time. most of the time i make simple things like salmon and stir-fried vegetables. i use a lot of olive and grapeseed and avacado oil. i roast, i bake, i saute. i do not generally fry or boil the shit out of anything. but that said, sometimes you just gotta have a fucking biscuit.

and lately i have been learning all about nutrition, and i have come to the conclusion that eating these things once in a while is a WAY better choice than what half of america eats every single day. at least these fat saturated items contain real ingredients, and not weird chemical experiments from the 50s designed to make food cheaper.

i think i might be a food snob.