My latest endeavor has been setting up a website to sell my ceramics! For the first 30 years or so of doing ceramics, I always said that my pieces fell into two camps: ones that I wouldn't sell, and ones that I couldn't sell. Over the last few years though, I have been fortunate to have the time to more more on my craft and have had some excellent teachers that have helped elevate my work. So while I have been making things for a while that I would and could sell, I'm finally taking the leap to actually sell them. I have decided to go on-line (not that there are many other options in today's environment), and directly sell from a website I am setting up on Shopify. There have been a bazillion tiny choices to make, a lot of learning to set up a store, lots of photographs; but I am getting close to a launch, hopefully next week. I will use this blog to announce when my store opens, as well as Instagram (@firecooked) and Facebook (Firecooked Ceramics). My website is firecooked.com, but it's not live yet.
Meanwhile, I'm still doing a lot of cooking. Looking forward to summer when I'm hoping we are able to gather in bigger groups, but for now still just mostly cooking for 2. And because its winter (although what we call winter here is not the deep freeze that most the country is currently in), we are eating lots of soups and stews that I make in family size batches, and nothing helps elevate a bowl of leftover soup like a couple of fresh biscuits.
They come together very quickly ... I normally have all the ingredients (and if I don't buttermilk, plain yogurt thinned with just a bit of milk works), and just cook in the toaster oven.
The butter get squished into the flour like for a piecrust, add your liquid.
1 cup flour (can be ¼ whole wheat if desired)
¼ teaspoon salt
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
4 tablespoons cold butter
3/8 cup (scant ½ cup) buttermilk
Oven: 425F (can use a toaster oven)
Mix dry ingredients in medium bowl. Cut butter into thin slices and drop individually into flour … toss as you are going so that all the butter slices are coated in flour. With fingers, squish butter slices in the flour, until no large pieces of butter remain, but mixture still has some pea-sized lumps. Add buttermilk, first mix together with a fork, then gently with fingers. Knead a couple of times in the bowl to bring it all together into a ball (add a bit more milk if needed, but the dough should not be sticky. Place ball on a floured surface. Flatten a bit and fold over one way, then the other. Pat the dough into a ½” thick square, and cut into quarters. Place quarters on a baking sheet (does not need to be greased, parchment paper is optional). Using your finger, wipe some buttermilk from the measuring cup and moisten the biscuit tops. Bake for about 12 minutes. Serve hot.
