One thing that remains the same.

Greetings! I hope everyone had a beautiful, delicious Thanksgiving. The weeks surrounding Thanksgiving and Christmas are among my favorite of the year. Spirits are a bit brighter, people are kinder to each other and there's this amazing feeling of hope in the air.

In our house, holiday menus change and guests come and go, but one thing that remains the same are my brother Michael’s southern biscuits.

My family cooks everything in an ancient Chamber stove. We light it with a match, and it’s miniscule by today’s GE standards, but it’s the world’s finest mechanism for roasting chicken and baking cookies.

Mike’s biscuits are the last things to go in the oven. Stomachs may rumble and side dishes may cool, but these biscuits are always worth the wait. Golden and fluffy, they’re excellent dipped in gravy, slathered in butter or nestled between turkey and cranberry sauce. Toasted and topped with raspberry jam, they’re wonderful for breakfast, too. Holidays in the Kutner household just wouldn’t be the same without them.

Michael’s Southern Biscuits
Adapted from Alton Brown’s recipe

Ingredients
2 C. flour
4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
2 Tbs cold butter
2 Tbs shortening
1 C. buttermilk, chilled (if you don’t have buttermilk, add a Tbs of lemon juice to whole milk)

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Using your fingertips, rub butter and shortening into dry ingredients until mixture starts to crumble. (The faster the better, because you don't want the fats to melt.)

Make a well in the center of the dough and pour in the chilled buttermilk. Stir just until the dough comes together—it will be very sticky. Turn dough onto floured surface, dust top with flour and gently fold dough over on itself 5 or 6 times. Press into a 1-inch thick round. Cut out biscuits with a 2-inch cookie cutter, being sure to push straight down through the dough.

Place biscuits on baking sheet so that they just touch. Reform scrap dough, working it as little as possible and continue cutting. Biscuits from the second pass won’t be quite as light as those from the first, but what can you do?

Bake until biscuits are tall and light gold on top, 15 to 20 minutes.