Biscuits

I love mornings. I woke up to a beautiful, cool August morning (extremely rare in the Midwest!), and I just felt like sipping coffee and baking. I decided to make these biscuits because I happened to have all the ingredients on hand. They are gluten free and oh so good! so good! so good! haha.

I got the recipe from the cookbook Primal Cravings: Your Favorite Foods Made Paleo. (http://www.health-bent.com/primalcravings) While I am not following a strict Paleo diet, I do try to stay (mostly) gluten-free. So I highly recommend this cookbook as I have yet to be disappointed by anything I've made from it! The recipe calls for a few things that most people probably don't have lying around (i.e. tapioca flour ... um, what?), but because I've made a few other recipes from this particular cookbook, I actually did happen to have everything on hand for once! They are neither sweet nor savory on their own, but I envision myself making a variety of different versions in the very near future. They would be delicious with blueberries mixed into the batter. Or a savory version with some kind of herb butter would be equally fantastic! I did not alter the recipe at all except for the cooking time. The recipe calls for 20-25 minutes at 400 degrees. I baked 'em for about 17 minutes and they were perfect!

Ingredients:
1 C tapioca flour
1/3 C coconut flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 egg
1 stick (1/2 C) butter, chilled
1/3 C cold water

Method:
Preheat oven to 400
Mix together dry ingredients
Cut butter into small-ish pieces and mix into the dry ingredients*
Once your butter is incorporated into the dry ingredient mixture (it will form sort of a loose crumble),
add the egg and cold water and continue mixing**
Once your dough is ready, form into approximately 8 biscuity-shaped balls (haha! my words, not theirs!) and place them on your cookie sheet that is either lined with parchment, silpat or spray.
Bake at 400 for approximately 17 minutes (also, my timing, not theirs ... but the edges and tops will turn a delicious golden brown.)


*the recipe said to mix with your hands, I used a pastry cutter, but either would work!
**again, the recipe called for mixing with your hands. I found a spatula to work just fine
(apparently I'm a wuss about getting my hands dirty??)

Aaannnnd speaking of biscuits ... my ass grew! How's that for transition? Seriously though, it did! Let me explain.

There are a few women at my Crossfit gym who have gotten together on a monthly basis to take body composition measurements. I had my measurements taken about two months ago, but avoided it last month and almost did again this month because I was afraid of what I would learn from them. Namely that all the progress I had made while doing a paleo challenge several months prior had been entirely reversed. But then I decided that was stupid. First of all, why avoid it just because you're afraid of what you'll find? If it's "bad," I would imagine it would only motivate me to really get back on the healthy-eating bandwagon ... or at least continue to work on decreasing my sugar intake. Second of all, I'm not entirely unhappy with the way I look, and all of my lifts have been going up, so I knew I needed to forget the scale and just focus on the composition part. So I decided to suck it up and find out!

I was really pleasantly surprised to find that while I gained about three pounds, my body fat percentage stayed pretty close to the same! (which was up a bit from when I finished the paleo challenge, but not much). So all in all, I was pretty happy!! And my ass measurement went up a whole inch!! Delicious biscuits indeed! ;)