Something Old, Something New

Three weeks ago I made a pie, and I’m just now getting around to writing about it. (Lately, that’s nothing new.) Something I figured out, not having time to do both:

It’s a whole lot more fun to eat pie and not write about it than it is to write about not eating pie.

I’m sure you would agree. Nevertheless, I thought I should at least share the pie with you. I mean the pie recipe. The pie itself is long gone. The recipe, however, is something old. Before I share it, I’ll fill you in on…

Something New

You may have noticed the straying from my usual format of a few photos with captions laced in between. That’s thanks to one of my favorite blogs, Small Things. Ginny Sheller shares about her life with her family in their 1800s farmhouse in eastern Virginia, where she raises six children, knits, and tries to maneuver life around her husband’s renovations. Most importantly, she shares their life in beautiful photographs that always seem to bring a sense of peace and calm pouring over me. My photos do not come close to measuring up to Ginny’s talented eye, but I thought I’d deliver them today in a way that might string together a story without me having to explain every detail, and let you put it together for yourself.

Of course, I’ve been known to over-explain in duplicate, sometimes even in triplicate, my random thoughts now and then. (Just ask my husband. I’m sure he’d be more than happy to confirm that for you.) So, there’s a chance that by the time you’re done reading, I will have given you the whole story in words anyway. I thought I should warn you. But then, I guess you will have figured that out by the time you are done reading…

Something Old

As you may have guessed, I collect cookbooks. I have hundreds of them. (Okay, I haven’t counted, but the tally is up there.) One of the series I continue to add to is my collection of Iowa State Fair cookbooks. A recent find is of the fair’s eighth edition, “History in the Baking,” during Iowa’s sesquicentennial celebration. The recipes contained within its pages are from three years of competition: 1993, 1994, and 1995. A special section includes recipes of yesteryear, a sampling representative of Iowa’s 150-year past.

While not from the section of historical recipes, I came across a recipe for coconut cream pie that looked to have the simple, old-fashioned flavor I was looking for. This pie won first place in the cream meringue class in 1995 and was prepared by Clifford R. Ellington of Des Moines. He topped the pie with meringue, but I was in the mood for a sweetened whipped cream. The only other adjustment I made to the recipe was adding a bit of coconut flavoring to the filling. The result was divine. I could have eaten it all day.

(Oh, wait…I did.)

Three weeks ago was also the first warm day of Spring for us, and the first weekend of soccer games. My kids wanted to spend their down time “playing sports”, so I snapped photos while they did so with their dad. And I observed a few more birds (a mourning dove and a brown thrasher) to add to our growing list of sightings.

Whether you’re doing something old or something new, I hope your Spring is off to a warm start.

Yours in pie,

Mindy

Old-Fashioned Coconut Cream Pie

(From “History in the Baking: Recipes from the Iowa State Fair," with slight changes)

For the filling:

1 c. sugar

¼ c. cornstarch

¼ tsp. salt

3 c. whole milk

4 egg yolks, slightly beaten

3 T. butter

1 ½ tsp. vanilla extract

¼ tsp. coconut flavoring

1 c. flaked coconut

1 9-inch baked pie shell

In saucepan, combine sugar, cornstarch, and salt. Gradually stir in milk. Cook until thickened and bubbly. Reduce heat; cook and stir 2 minutes more. Remove from heat. Stir a little hot mixture (about 1 c.) into beaten egg yolks. Return to saucepan and heat until bubbly. Cook and stir 2 minutes more. Remove from heat. Stir in butter, vanilla, and coconut flavoring. Stir in coconut; mix well. Transfer mixture to a bowl and place bowl in ice water bath, stirring to cool. When completely cool, transfer mixture to baked pie shell, cover surface with plastic wrap, and refrigerate several hours.

For topping:

1 c. whipping cream

¼ c. sugar

1 tsp. vanilla extract

Toasted flaked coconut (about 2 T.)

Beat whipping cream in bowl of electric mixer until frothy. Gradually begin adding sugar, beating continuously until soft peaks begin to form. Stir in vanilla. Top filling with whipped cream and sprinkle on toasted coconut to garnish. Store pie in refrigerator.


I shared this recipe on:
Full-Plate Thursday at Miz Helen's Country Cottage and
Church Supper at Everyday Mom's Meals.

A Break from the Drought (of Pie)

Pucker-Up Lemon Meringue Pie

I’m back, and so is spring! The warm sun and fresh air prompted me to make a pie, one that is equally bright and cheery, to awaken all the senses. (Except for hearing. I’m pretty sure we can’t hear pie. Unless that’s the point: peace and quiet.)

But first…

There’s been a long pie drought plaguing my household. I shared with you back in January that I would be adopting simplicity as a sort of theme for the year ahead. That meant that making pie, and sharing it on this blog, would happen a little less often.

Three months is a wee bit longer than what I had in mind.

Since that time, I’ve been busy. Aside from watching all the home improvement projects my husband has been completing around the house as we’re getting ready to sell (watching him takes up a lot of my time and energy), I have been working on some of my own little projects. Mostly, they’ve been in the form of organization. While reading Simplicity Parenting (you may recall seeing this book in a past photo), I decided to cut down the collections of toys, games, puzzles, and general kid-clutter in our house…by half. This made a serious dent not only in making the space more visually appealing, but also in our children taking greater responsibility to routinely clean up their things when they are done.

Books have been another issue that needed my attention. I love to read, and I certainly have some books that will maintain their place on my bookshelf for a long time to come. I have a habit of hanging on to books that serve as a reference for me, but once they are no longer useful to me, I pass them on. So my own books have not really been the problem. It’s the children’s books that have taken over our household.

I’d like to blame this on my children, but I can’t.  When my son was born and I quit teaching to stay home with him, all the children’s books I had purchased came home with me. Having been a reading teacher for nine years, there were a lot of books. And you can’t ask a reading teacher to get rid of her books.

But it didn’t stop there. We added board books for the baby years, gave our kids special keepsake books for every birthday, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, and every major and minor holiday including Hanukkah (even though we’re not Jewish), and ordered from nearly every Scholastic book order (which often came home three at a time) since preschool started three years ago. Not to mention the Scholastic book fairs during parent-teacher conferences. And don’t forget the library books, both from the school library and the public libraries (yes, we are card-carrying members to four area libraries). Once, we had so many books checked out that when it was finally time to return them, I had to haul them in an 18-gallon tote in the back of my vehicle. (I think we had checked out over 80 children’s books, over the course of several visits to the library, at that time.)

Like me, my children also love to read. My son was reading early first-grade material before he even started preschool, and my daughter, who is currently in preschool, is reading at a mid-kindergarten level. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that all the books they have been surrounded by since the days of their births (yes, really – Goodnight Moon was one of the first board books I read to them in the hospital when they were born), have been a major contributor to their success as readers and more importantly, their love of reading and good books. And I know that watching their parents read, surrounded by lots of good books ourselves, has influenced them as well.

So, I’m not going to apologize for all the books, but I do still have control of them. While I’m quite certain that I didn’t cut down our collection of children’s books by half, I did remove a sizeable chunk. Enough that we could more easily house the books in the space we have. And in keeping with simplicity, I found a system for organizing them that finally works for us.

I’m not sure why I waited this long (only seven years) to figure this out. It’s essentially what I did to organize books in my classroom. At school, I organized my books by reading level because that’s how I needed to use them. This time, I organized our children’s books by category (such as science-related books, favorite authors, favorite characters, etc.), assigned a different color code to each category, labeled individual books within a category with stickers of the same color, and placed all those books in the same basket on the shelf. My son and daughter each have a shelved set of baskets in their rooms, where we keep all the books, and the books are shared by all. So that made 16 baskets of book categories. I had to get a little creative to come up with that many color codes, but I made it work. (I know that doesn’t sound simple, but it is when you consider the hundreds of books that would eventually end up in stacks throughout my kids’ bedrooms as they pulled them off the shelf because they couldn’t easily find the books they wanted.)

I still have to create labels with corresponding stickers for each basket front so the kids can easily find a book category and also quickly know where to put back a book. Right now they just check inside a basket to find sticker colors, and even so, it still is working so much better than anything else we’ve tried (or haven’t tried). 

And speaking of books, we’ve been using a recent book purchase to more thoroughly enjoy spring outdoors. I found this Birds of Iowa Field Guide in the bookstore of the Prairie Learning Center at the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge. We headed “to the prairie,” as we like to say, over Spring Break to enjoy the peaceful quietness we always find there.

While at the refuge scouting for the bison herd, we were surprised when we came upon a herd of 17 deer...





I also took the bird guide with us when we spent a few days over break visiting my sister. We had planned to hike a nearby nature trail while there, but it was unexpectedly cold and snowing that day. The bird guide wouldn’t have done the most good there anyway. My sister lives in Kansas. My bird guide is for Iowa. (I’m always prepared like that.)

We have been using the bird guide to study the birds we see in our backyard and the park behind our house. So far over the last few weeks, we’ve observed and identified: hairy woodpeckers, red-bellied woodpeckers (not to be confused with red-headed woodpeckers), blue jays, Northern cardinals, house finches, dark-eyed juncos, black-capped chickadees, American robins, and numerous sparrows, as well as the standard Canada geese and mallard ducks we often see in the ponds and creek we pass during walks along the trail near our house.

This is a female hairy woodpecker in a river birch tree in my backyard. Or it could be a downy woodpecker. They look very similar.



What does all this have to do with pie? The organization projects, time spent outdoors, and bird-watching are just a few of the activities that have kept me busy over the last few months. They are also what caused the pie drought in our house. But, after such a long spell without pie, this one sure tasted good!

Here’s to hoping this is the end of our drought.

Yours in pie,

Mindy





The filling is a deeper layer than it looks in this photo. After I made the pie, I was impatient and forgot to chill it before slicing into it. As a result, the filling oozed out. Don't forget to chill it before enjoying!

If you’re looking for intense lemon flavor with just enough sweetness to make you crave more, and an insanely high layer of the fluffiest meringue this side of the Rocky Mountains, so fluffy you’ll think that it’s whipped cream, then this is the pie for you. I first saw this pie being made on Cook’s Country, and when I tried their recipe, the level of tartness was sky high itself. I’ll never forget the seriously-puckered look on my husband’s face after his first taste, which only became more so with each subsequent bite. The next time I made a few adjustments, and this became an instant favorite.

I entered this pie in the 2010 Iowa State Fair in the Machine Shed Pie contest. It took first place in the lemon meringue class, and then second overall for the contest, out of about 120 pies. I think you’ll agree: this pie is a winner!

Pucker-Up Lemon Meringue Pie

Adapted from Cook’s Country

For filling:

1 ¼ c. sugar

¼ c. cornstarch

¼ tsp. salt

¾ c. freshly squeezed lemon juice

¾ c. water

8 large egg yolks (reserve 4 whites for meringue)

1 T. grated lemon zest

3 T. butter, cut into pieces

Pre-baked 9” pie crust

In saucepan, whisk together sugar, cornstarch, and salt; add lemon juice and water, and whisk until dissolved. Bring to simmer over medium-high heat, whisking occasionally, until mixture becomes translucent and begins to thicken, about 5 minutes. Whisk in egg yolks until combined. Stir in lemon zest and butter. Bring to simmer, stirring constantly, about 2 minutes. Cool completely and pour into baked pie shell. Cover surface directly with plastic wrap and place in refrigerator until well-chilled, several hours or overnight.

 

For meringue:

½ c. water

1 c. sugar

4 large egg whites (room temperature)

Pinch of salt

½ tsp. cream of tartar

½ tsp. vanilla extract

Combine water and sugar in saucepan. Bring to vigorous boil and cook 4 minutes, until slightly thickened and syrupy. Remove from heat and set aside. Beat egg whites in electric mixer until frothy, about 1 minute. Add salt and cream of tartar. Beat, gradually increasing speed, until whites hold soft peaks, about 2 minutes. With mixer running, slowly pour hot syrup into whites. Add vanilla and beat until meringue has cooled and becomes very thick and shiny, 5 to 9 minutes. Mound meringue over chilled filling, being careful to seal the meringue to the crust around the edges. Bake in 400° oven on lower-middle rack until peaks turn golden brown, about 6 minutes. Cool completely on wire rack, then chill well in refrigerator before slicing and serving.

I shared this recipe on Church Supper at Everyday Mom's Meals.

I'm a Centerfold!

Well, sort of…

You can stop laughing now.

I am in a magazine, but I’m not exactly the centerfold. The actual centerfold pages are 42-43.

I’m on pages 72-73. Well, really I’m on page 72. The story is on page 73. And that’s on the left column of the page. (The other column is the recipe. And that’s only about one-third of that column. The rest of the column belongs to two other recipes.)

Really. You can stop laughing now.

Oh, and I have my clothes on. Trust me on this: I’m doing you a favor.

But seriously, stop laughing!

Last August, one of the food competitions I entered at the Iowa State Fair was sponsored by Our Iowa magazine, called Our Iowa Church Cookbook Favorites. Each year the magazine sponsors the division and they choose a different category. For the 2012 fair the category was coffee cake. And I won first place!

I prepared a rhubarb coffee cake recipe from a church cookbook whose recipes I grew up on. It was published way back in 1977 for the Wellsburg Reformed Church, comprised of tons of the best recipes from the ladies of the church. This recipe was submitted by Mrs. Carl L. (Ann) Nederhoff.

Part of winning the contest is the prize money, $400, given to the kitchen fund of the Iowa church from whose cookbook the recipe was taken. The other part of winning is a spot in the “Recipes They’re Proud to Share” feature in an issue of Our Iowa. Back in September, a photographer from Des Moines, Perry Struse, spent an entire afternoon at my house photographing me, the coffee cake, and me with the coffee cake (by the way, it wasn’t the winning coffee cake; I did make a fresh one for the shoot – two, actually). He made the long day a fun one, and even shot some photos of my daughter and me.

Yesterday, a package arrived in the mail with an Our Iowa apron, as well as an advance copy of the February/March 2013 issue. So, I don’t know if I’m allowed to do this or not, but...do you want a sneak peek?

 

That’s my daughter in the recipe card photo, pretending to chew on a piece of rhubarb. I think she’d rather just eat her rhubarb in the coffee cake.

 

If you’re interested in the story along with several other coffee cake recipes from the contest, you can subscribe to Our Iowa magazine on their website. Or, you can visit one of the retailers which carry the magazine. You can find a list by clicking here.

(Personally, I would get the subscription. I’ve been a subscriber myself since first spotting the June/July 2010 issue at The Machine Shed Restaurant. I even give gift subscriptions, and I’ve never done that for any magazine ever. I subscribe to several magazines, and this is by far the one I cannot wait to arrive. I read absolutely everything in it, which takes a long time because it’s not filled with a bunch of advertising the way most magazines are. It’s published by Roy Reiman, founder of Reiman Publications, which originally published magazines like Taste of Home, Birds & Blooms, Country…..so you know this is quality. And it’s written and photographed by fellow Iowans. Definitely a gem for touring the great state of Iowa!)

Another unanticipated perk for me of winning this contest is that I finally now have in my possession my very own copy of the church cookbook! Every summer I “borrow” my mom’s copy in search of a great recipe to fit the magazine’s contest category for the upcoming state fair. So I asked the church if they knew where I could find a copy. 35 years after it was printed meant my chances were not good. But they came through and located a copy and sent it to me. I’m so grateful! Now I can browse and bake some of the recipes from my childhood whenever I want!

 
Before I share the recipe for the coffee cake, I want to take a moment to thank not only the Wellsburg Reformed Church for the cookbook, but also Our Iowa magazine for a fun experience: at the fair, during the photo shoot, and through phone conversations with Paula Wiebel (editorial assistant and wife to editor Jerry Wiebel). I am grateful for the generous prize money; I know the church will put it to good use. And thank you especially for including me in my favorite magazine...even if I’m not the centerfold.

Yours in pie (uh, I mean coffee cake),

Mindy

Rhubarb Coffee Cake

from the Wellsburg Reformed Church cookbook, “Happiness is Good Cooking,” page 116*

For cake:

 

2 ½ c. all-purpose flour

1 tsp. baking soda

½ tsp. salt

½ c. butter, softened

1 ½ c. sugar

1 egg

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1 c. buttermilk

3 c. chopped rhubarb

1 c. packed brown sugar

½ c. chopped walnuts

Combine flour, baking soda, and salt in small bowl and set aside. In mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add egg and vanilla; beat well. Gradually add flour mixture, alternating with buttermilk, and mix until combined. Fold in rhubarb.

Spread batter in greased 9x13-inch baking pan. Combine brown sugar and walnuts in a bowl; sprinkle on top of batter. Bake at 350° for about 45 minutes, until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.

For topping:

½ c. butter

1 c. sugar

¾ c. evaporated milk

1 tsp. vanilla

Combine butter, sugar, and evaporated milk in saucepan and heat until boiling. Boil for 3 ½ minutes; remove from heat and add vanilla. Beat well. Pour over warm cake just after it’s removed from oven. Poke holes in cake to let topping soak in. Cool on wire rack.

*If you have a copy of this cookbook, you may notice that flour is not listed in the original recipe. In my mom’s copy, she hand wrote “2 ½ c. flour” – a great perk about living in a small town: when something’s missing from a recipe, you can ask the contributor yourself.

Happy National Pie Day!

It’s National Pie Day! I hope you made a pie to celebrate, because I didn’t.  In fact, I haven’t made a pie, a real pie, in almost a month. You would think that someone who makes a pie every week and writes a blog about it would make pie a little more often than I have lately.

Well, I’ve been doing other things with my time. More important things. Things that need some attention.

I don’t really make New Year’s resolutions, but when I turn the page on the calendar and begin a new year, I do tend to reflect on what the previous year was like and what I want to change. Mostly, I re-evaluate my priorities. And this year, my theme, if you will, is simplicity.

I know I won’t make everything in my life as absolutely simple as it could possibly be. But simplicity itself is not the goal, nor is it the point. I want to simplify the things in my life so I can focus on what’s truly important to me. Like my family.

Monday was a no-school day for my son. It was not for my daughter, but we made it one by skipping preschool at the last minute to spend a fun day together. We spent part of our time at the library. After my son checked out what seemed to be every title in the Star Wars: The Clone Wars series, as well as some “Fact Tracker” titles as non-fiction companions to The Magic Tree House series (“Jack and Annie books” as my son lovingly refers to them), we headed home to do a little reading.

This is one of my son's latest favorite reading positions.

(Mary Pope Osborne, I hope you’re reading this. I don’t want this to sound pushy, but I’m afraid it will. You already do a fabulous job at writing quickly. A new title every four to six months is most impressive, but do you think you could write even a little faster and turn out new Magic Tree House titles more often? Like the wind that spins the tree house at the start of each adventure, my son has now blown through nearly the first half of your series at warp speed, currently reading #23, Twister on Tuesday. He has tunnel vision on #47, Abe Lincoln at Last, and at this rate, he’ll probably be finished with the entire series by April. And then what will we do? Do you have a plan? Otherwise, we’ll have to start looking for another great series that turns history and geography and the wonders of the world into incredible magical adventures that engage children in text while teaching them almost everything they’ll ever need to know about almost everything that has ever happened since the beginning of time. I’m exaggerating here, but you know what I mean. You should. You wrote the books. So what do you say?)

After some time reading, we spent the rest of the day, I believe the coldest so far this winter, engaged in winter-themed indoor projects. We designed snowflakes out of toothpicks and marshmallows:



These marshmallow-and-toothpick snowflakes were inspired by Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas.
 

We created snowflakes to hang in the window by folding and cutting shapes out of coffee filters:

 

And we made more homemade play dough, this time leaving it un-tinted and sprinkling in some glitter to make it sparkle like snow:

You can find our favorite play dough recipe at How Does She.
 

And none of this would have been possible if I had instead spent the day doing all the “extras”, like scrubbing the grout lines in the tile floor (I’d rather pay someone), cooking a gourmet seven-course dinner (we had leftover beefburgers instead), or writing a blog post about a pie that took another hour or more of my day just to make (leftover homemade oatmeal cake is just as sweet).

While simplicity has its advantages, I do realize it can also mean missing out on some things from time to time. And that’s why I won’t entirely give up the “extras,” I’ll just keep them in perspective and do them when it works for me to do them. But simplicity can also mean having more time to do some things you would like to do more often (like actually doing some of the fabulous projects with my kids that I find on Pinterest), because you refocused your priorities and simplified other areas of your life.

Like reading. I don’t get to read as much as I would like. I enjoy writing, too, but as Shelley Harwayne, one of my favorite authors on teaching writing, likes to say, I’m a better writer because I read.

My latest choice for reading is accompanied by a nice hot cup of pomegranate green tea. And by reading, I mean it sits on a basket in between me glancing through the table of contents and browsing a page or two.

 

While baking a pie every week and writing a blog about it has been mostly for me, I still have not placed myself high enough on my list of priorities. Mainly, I haven’t focused on taking care of myself in the ways I want to. I know that simplifying my life will allow me more time to do that as well.

So, Pie on Sunday is not going away entirely. I’ll still share the recipes with you, and maybe some stories, but I won’t be making pie as often as every week. I love pie, and so does my family, but quite frankly, we miss all the other treats I used to bake when I wasn’t making so much pie!

I hope you do get to enjoy some pie on this National Pie Day, on Sunday, or any time you get the chance. As for me, I’ll be enjoying more time with myself and with my family, on Sundays and every other day in between, and we’ll share some pie when it’s simple to do so.

Yours in pie, and in simplicity,

Mindy

 P.S. If you don't want to have to remember to keep checking back here for new posts, just subscribe by email, and you can get new posts in your inbox. Simple.

Mileage from a Chicken Pot Pie

 

What do these two pictures have in common?

Mileage.

(I know. I’m the Queen of Strange and Unusual Connections. I can’t help it. It’s the reading teacher in me.)

Allow me to explain…

(Well, I’ll explain the connection between the two pictures. You’ll have to figure out the reading teacher part yourself.)

My sister sent me this photo she took of the odometer in her car when it turned 400,000 miles just the other day. No extra zeroes in that number. That’s correct. Four-fifths of the way to a half-million miles.

She drives a 1995 Toyota Camry. Well, now her husband mostly drives it. They traded in his much newer car for another much newer Camry. (The one she now mostly drives.) And that officially makes them a Cam-Fam. (Get it? That’s Camry and family put together. I made it up. Like you didn’t know.)

And me? I’m green with envy. I mean, how many people out there can say they have 400,000 miles on their car, 385,000 of which they put on it all by themselves? (Not including Ferris Bueller. And he didn’t even go anywhere.) But, that’s what you get when you take excellent care of your car, people. My sister is the only person I know who actually waxes her car by hand and follows the maintenance schedule in the owner’s manual to a T. Contrary to the popular belief of most men, those manuals really are worth reading.

What does all this have to do with chicken pot pie? Well, it doesn’t come with an owner’s manual, unless you count the recipe. But chicken pot pie can definitely get you some mileage. I mean, how many dishes out there can you serve without a crust and still call it a pie? (Okay, not counting Boston Cream Pie.) That’s the point. You can serve chicken pot pie pretty much any way you want and still call it pie.

I prepared this chicken pot pie over the weekend, and it was the perfect answer to a bitterly cold January day. My friend, Jill, gave me the recipe several months ago, and I’ve made it three times already. I love that there is no canned soup in it, and even so, it’s still just as simple. Jill makes hers with top and bottom pastry crusts, but I changed it a little and used a biscuit topping instead. I love the buttery goodness of the biscuits with the creamy taste and texture of the chicken filling. Definitely comfort food to warm you, body and soul.

Dare I say it? Warm your engine and get some mileage with this chicken pot pie, no matter how you make it.

Yours in pie,

Mindy

 Chicken Pot Pie with Biscuit Topping

Filling recipe from Jill Kinnison

Biscuit recipe from Taste of Home 

For the filling:
1/3 c. butter
1/3 c. onion, chopped
1/3 c. all-purpose flour
½ tsp. salt
¼ tsp. pepper
1 ½ c. chicken broth
2/3 c. milk
2 to 2 ½ c. shredded, cooked chicken
2 c. or more frozen mixed vegetables (I used peas and carrots)

In skillet, melt butter over medium heat. Add onion and cook for 2 minutes or until tender. Stir in flour, salt, and pepper until well blended. Gradually stir in chicken broth and milk, stirring constantly until mixture is bubbly and thick. Add chicken and vegetables. Remove from heat and pour into greased 9” square (or larger) baking dish.

For the biscuits:
2 c. all-purpose flour
4 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. sugar
½ tsp. salt
½ tsp. cream of tartar
½ c. cold butter, cubed
2/3 c. milk

In large bowl, combine flour, baking powder, sugar, salt and cream of tartar. Cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs; stir in milk just until moistened. Turn onto a lightly-floured surface; knead 8 to 10 times. Pat or roll out to ½-inch thickness. Cut with 2 ½-inch biscuit cutter.

Place biscuits over chicken mixture in baking dish. Bake, uncovered, at 400° for about 20 minutes or until biscuits are golden brown.  


I shared this recipe on:

Full-Plate Thursday at Miz Helen's Country Cottage
Church Supper at Everyday Mom's Meals

 Check out all the great recipes at these Linky Parties!