Squash Biscuits

Squash Biscuits are a great way to add some color to your table and get an extra serving of vegetables in your meal.

What does one do with leftover squash puree? Two weekends ago, I had a friend over to cook from my CSA and enjoy my tasty farm fresh eggs, since her CSA sadly does not offer eggs. We whipped up some souffle, figuring that was the best dish to utilize all the eggs I had been hoarding in my fridge for this dinner. However, I didn’t want to make just a plain cheese souffle, I wanted something that screamed fall and something that would let her taste other items from my CSA.

So I roasted up the big mystery squash/pumpkin looking thing that had been sitting on my dining room table as a center piece for 3 weeks. It was a project, it was huge, it took almost 2 hours to roast until it was soft enough to puree and then even then it took my food processor and immersion blender to make a velvety smooth puree.

A big squash though, produces a lot of puree and souffle does not need a lot of puree, so what was I to do with the rest? I could freeze it, but I was running out of room in my freezer and I was likely to forget about it. It need to be used now, then I thought. Biscuits! Why not, people make sweet potato biscuits, squash should work too. If they turned out well I could make them for Thanksgiving or even the morning after for breakfast.

Recipe

2 cups all purpose flour (plus an additional 1/4 cup if the dough is sticky)

3 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

4 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

1 cup squash puree

1/3 cup milk

1 tablespoon honey

plus extra flour for dusting

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F.

In a medium bowl whisk together 2 cups flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cayenne pepper. Using a pastry cutter or my preferred method your fingers cut the butter into the flour until coarse crumbs are formed, working as quickly as possible. Place the bowl in the fridge for 10 minutes to let the butter cool down again.

While the butter/flour mixture is cooling, in a small bowl mix the milk, squash puree and honey together.

Remove the butter/flour mixture from the fridge and make a well in the middle, add the squash mixture and carefully fold the dry ingredients into the wet. Fold as best as you can in the bowl and add up to a 1/4 cup of flour if the dough is sticky.

Scoop the dough out onto a floured surface and pat together. To form flaky layers you want to fold the dough on top of itself. Pat dough into a rectangle and fold in half, rotate and fold in half again. Repeat two more times. Adding more flour to the surface to keep from sticking. Finally pat the dough out to about 3/4 inch thickness. Using a biscuit cutter (or in my case the cookie cutter that I have at home, which is slightly smaller) cut out your biscuits and transfer to a parchment or silicone lined baking sheet. Reroll the scraps and cut the remaining dough. The biscuits edges should be touching each other.