Biscuits for the Lazy

Well hey y'all. I made biscuits.
And they were gooooood.

I had some cute helpers...

And thank God for that because I am LAZY. I am so damn lazy. And thank God biscuits are easy. Lazy. First of all, I read tons of biscuit recipes. I did my research. I tested some out. That part was not lazy. I did not go out and get any Lily White flour or whatever the Southerners use. I did not make my own baking powder or whatever the non-lazy people do. I wanted to use what I had, which was regular ol' unbleached flour and regular ol' baking powder. This, I could argue, is simply practical for my life - not lazy.

I did not roll out the dough and use a cute little ring-shaped biscuit cutter to cut perfect biscuits. Also not lazy. I like slapping down imperfect balls of dough for a more rustic final product. Fully informed and deliberate decision.

Lazy is a weekend morning spent in bed until 11 then rolling yourself down to the kitchen, whipping up a batch of biscuits, and eating them all before returning to bed. Please don't judge me. I like my weekends. I like my breakfasts. I like my bed.

If you'd like to judge me on this little tidbit, however, please feel free: the reason my biscuits ended up being baked in a muffin pan is because I was too lazy to pull out the cookie sheet. I would have had to pull out like three extra pans from my drawer under the stove to reach it. Totally unacceptable.

They turned out fine, of course. Pan irrelevant. A handy tool you may want to enlist for your own biscuits is a pastry blender (see below). If you make pies - let me rephrase that - if you make your own pie crusts, you probably have one of these. Less effective substitutes (I've tried both) are forks, or a food processor. Eh. They're fine, I guess. If you're not lazy. If you ARE lazy, the forks are too much work and the cuisinart is too heavy and a pain in the ass to clean.

My mom is totally going to lecture me. I can't wait.

Recipe for Buttermilk Biscuits (adapted for the lazy), from The Yellow Farmhouse Cookbook:

(By Christopher Kimball, the man behind Cook's Illustrated, so you know he's tried these a million which ways, done science experiments and probably sent them to the moon. So you know they're good.)

• 2 cups of flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 4 tbsp cold butter
• 3 tbsp cold crisco
• 3/4 cup of buttermilk

Heat oven to 425. In a large bowl, mix the first 4 ingredients. Add the butter and crisco, and cut and mix using the pastry blender, until the butter/crisco is about the size of small peas. You should be able to still see little chunks and the dough should resemble coarse meal. Using a spatula, stir as you pour in the buttermilk very slowly in a thin stream. The dough will come together, and feel free to start using your hands to get it to hold together. It will be wet and sticky. Take fistfulls and lay them out on a cookie sheet (or muffin pan, whatever you can find, you lazy bum!!), then transfer to the oven. Bake for about 15 minutes or a little longer until they are nice and golden. Serve hot with butter, jam, gravy, whatever you like.

This is the aftermath of biscuit breakfast, about 47 seconds later....