Bela Lugosi’s Dead

I hafta use up the rest of the buttermilk in the fridge before it goes bad. Wait, does buttermilk even go bad? It’s already got cultures in it, right? That’s neither here nor there – I made biscuits. Delicious, fluffy buttermilk biscuits.

I insist that the very best biscuits are baked in a cast-iron skillet all glued together so that each one is soft and fluffy as a little happy butter cloud. That way if you like a little flaky crumb, you can go for the edge, but if you prefer a biscuit unencumbered by crust you can shoot for the center pieces.

Buttermilk Biscuits, the Only Right Way
There are definitely many ways to make biscuits, but if you want impossibly gossamer biscuits such as these, you just can’t fuck with the dough too much or you’ll build up too much gluten. Makes a dozen biscuits.

2 c AP flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
pinch salt
6 tbsp cold butter, cut into 1/2″ cubes
3/4 c buttermilk

Preheat your oven to 450o F. In your handy-dandy food processor, pulse the dry ingredients together to combine. Add the butter and blitz until the mixture resembles coarse bread crumbs. Add the milk all at once and hold your finger on the pulse button for like 4 or 5 seconds until the dough comes together. Stop the instant it does! Turn that bitch out onto a floured surface.

Mush the dough just barely enough to get it into a ball. Don’t even bother rolling the dough, just press and flatten gently with your fingers, eye-balling it to roughly the size of the skillet. This is important if you want to not fuck this up. Cut the dough into biscuits by pressing straight down with a scraper or a knife (don’t saw back and forth) and lay it into the skillet. Brush the tops with a little melted butter or milk.

Bake for 12-15 minutes (it takes a bit longer when making it a big loaf like this), until the top is golden brown and crusty, or sounds a bit hollow to the tap of a fingernail.

These are nice with jams – I have blueberry, strawberry and apricot. As always, serve with copious amounts of sausages. (I’m a fucking German girl, verstanden?)

You’re sitting there, wondering what the hell any of this has to do with Bauhaus, aren’t you. So I was fixin’ to serve up the brekkie, and I start pouring the bubbly into the glasses. Then I pull out the peach-orange juice numminess and I was telling Scott that this’ll be like a Mimosa-lini. Or a Bella-mosa. Or a Bela Lugosa. (I like to come up with catchy names for my cocktails.) And then my handsome genius husband, says “well if you’re gonna call it a Bela Lugosa you hafta put some blood orange in it.” Oh fuck sake. Blood orange mimosa – why didn’t I think of that!

Unfortunately, the sinister color of the blood orange was somewhat diluted by the sparkly, and didn’t look as amazing as it sounded like it should’ve. It tasted nice, though. It’s booze for breakfast!

Bela Lugosa
I know his name is Bela Lugosi, but Lugosi doesn’t rhyme with mimosa, so there. This is a hybrid between a mimosa and a bellini. Serves 2.

8 oz. Prosecco (Trader Joe’s has a $5 Prosecco that is very drinkable)
6 oz. peach-orange juice (Florida’s Own makes a nice organic one that’s 100% juice)
juice from one blood orange

Combine each of things and pour into a champagne flute or some other elegant, narrow glass. A test tube would be a propos.