Cookbooks and Green Biscuits

Today Nate and I opened the box my mom shipped us for Christmas. Among all of the other amazingness was this cookbook. This is the cookbook my parent's church put out in 1985. I have cooked out of this book as long as I can remember. Many of our family's favorite recipes are found here. Their Ladies Group decided to reprint the cookbook this year. As you can imagine, I was very excited to get this cookbook. Not only are many of the recipes that I always call mom about in here, but like other cookbooks from other eras, it gives us a unique glance back in time. Oleo, Eagle Brand Milk, Cool Whip. Not items that I frequently use anymore but that I remember fondly from my childhood (did anyone else sneak spoonfuls of cool whip from the freezer?)

Tonight we decided to make a large pot of cupboard soup - wherein you use the things in your cupboard to make an impromptu soup - for dinner. We sort of threw together sauteed onions and garlic, cubed potatoes, red lentils, green lentils, quinoa, pearled barley, tomato paste, pickled turnips and parsnips (weird, I know, but surprisingly good!), and some random spices. It turned out good! But while the soup was simmering, I remembered a childhood treat: green biscuits. Green biscuits make everything better. I remember my mom making biscuits, melting butter in the bottom of a pan, adding dried green stuff and letting us help by dipping both sides of the biscuits in the butter mix and then licking our fingers. The biscuits were then arranged in the pan on top of whatever butter was left and cooked until golden. The resulting biscuits were everything we ever wanted in a savory biscuit: flaky, buttery, and utterly yummy. Tonight I threw together a biscuit dough (based on this one, but I used a LOT more flour, maybe it's the altitude...) and flipped through the new cookbook until I found the recipe.

Green Biscuits (aka Herbed Biscuits)

These will forever be known to me as green biscuits. As I was throwing this together last minute, I didn't have all of the ingredients. Seeing as this came from 1985, the Parmesan cheese was from the green Kraft bottle (and we referred to this cheese as green cheese, appropriate it would seem). And the onion flakes were, well, those weird freeze dried onion flakes. I didn't have these two items. I'm guessing this would be even better with real Parmesan...

1 stick butter
2 t parsley flakes
1T dried dill (more or less to taste, I love the stuff so I kind of went overboard)
2T dried onion flakes
2T Parmesan cheese

Heat oven to 425. Melt butter in a 9x13 pan in the oven. Add the rest of the ingredients and stir. Mix up your favorite biscuit recipe and roll it out on a floured surface. I tend to roll these out thinner than most other biscuits. Cut biscuits into your preferred shape (I just roll them out flat and cut with a knife into sort of squares so I don't have to worry about scraps). Dip each side of the biscuit into the mixture and lay the biscuits out in the pan. Go ahead and crowd them in there. They won't stick to each other. Bake for about 12 minutes or until the top is golden. All that herby buttery goodness will have baked into the crusty bottoms of the biscuits. Try not to eat the whole pan.