Report from the kitchen: CEM, part two

Previously on this blog: I decided to cook two recipes from Cooking Light Annual Recipes 2006, my choice for Cookbook Exploitation Month. I already wrote about wandering vigorously off-course for the broccoli soup. Well, I also had to punt for the other selection: Sour Cream, Cheddar, and Green Onion Biscuits (page 63).

To recap, it was a cruddy rainy night and I was commited to NOT going out to the store. I almost immediately realized that I didn't have any green onions, but that was easy: I kept a quarter-onion out of the soup, and sauteed it to add sweetness. I already knew I was subbing yogurt for sour cream: Yogurt, Cheddar, and Sauteed Onion biscuits were a BIT off course but not too bad. Only after I finished making my Broccoli (-spinach) Soup did I realize I'd used up all the milk... and remember that my recipe called for 1 cup of buttermilk as the main liquid source! (I'd intended to cheat and sour it with lemon juice.)

I'd already measured out the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and baking soda). I didn't have milk. I didn't feel like cutting butter into the dry ingredients anyway, AND I'd loaned a friend my cookie cutters. All in all this recipe had to be scrapped.

I got lucky on the first shot, pulling out my trusty old Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home (the absolute best in their series). There was a recipe for Savory Scallion Biscuits, which did NOT use milk or butter! Of course their recipe didn't call for onions or cheddar, but I stuck 'em in anyway. Once you have a feel for muffins and biscuits, you can fake them pretty well (witness my Company-Worthy Muffins!).

In the end they came out GREAT. In fact I had trouble eating only one!

Semi-Improvised cheddar-onion biscuits
Preheat oven to 400
2 cups flour
1 T sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
2 T oil
3/4 c shredded cheddar
1/4 onion, sauteed until soft
~3/4 - 1 cup non- or low-fat yogurt

Mix the dry ingredients; add the wet ingredients. I added the yogurt in 1/4-cup increments until the dough hung together without being too wet and used a bit less than one cup.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper, put the dough on it, pat into about 1 1/2 inch thickness, cut into 8 pieces, and separate the pieces from each other. Bake for 20 minutes.