Buttermilk Scones with Green Onions | Mindful Eating

Added scallions to the scone batter

Start the day with a great breakfast. And start the year with the casual scones. Besides breakfast, what about scones for tea? The idea of having tea with a buttery scone gives me joy. In addition, I like how quickly and adaptable it is to make scones — with very few ingredients. Use the buttermilk scones recipe below as none other than an essential guideline. By and large, the ingredients you need are flour, fat and milk. At roughly a 3:1:2 ratio, in weight. Even the individual ingredient is negotiable based on your dietary needs.

Talking about diet, why not take a new tack in 2022: forget about dieting and start savoring your food instead. See the article in the New York Times titled: “Diets Make You Feel Bad. Try Training Your Brain Instead.” The idea is not so much about what you eat, rather how and why you eat. The suggestion is to eat mindfully, which can be easily said than done. But it makes sense to me to understand the circumstances you reach for the kinds of food you know are not your best choices.

Building a Healthy and Balanced Diet

It’s hard to resist snacking, especially during the holidays, and the occasional bingeing. Somehow, we all fall victims to eating mindlessly when we’re stressed, anxious, bored, happy, sad or hungry. Called that emotional eating. Research has shown how building awareness of our emotions may be a better way in promoting good eating habits. Start by identifying our problematic eating behaviors and the triggers.

Let’s set up for mindful and healthful eating behaviors in 2022.

Now the big-picture idea is out of the way, let’s get busy with making some good food. Playing around and adapting recipes can be a fun activity. I’m particularly fond of those strategic and foundational ones which’d evolve into a myriad of delicious recipes.

Turn the buttermilk scones into spelt scones by replacing all-purpose flour with spelt. Substitute 3/4 cups all-purpose flour with 1 cup of oats to make oatmeal scones. Add dried fruit, like currants or cranberries, to make fruit scones. Fresh fruit, like banana or apple, cut into small chunks, also works. Rub lemon zest and add poppy seeds to the dry ingredients and make lemon-poppy seed scones. To substitute for butter, consider olive oil, almond butter or coconut oil. There are so many ways to channel your creative juice and start filling your head space with good karma.

Tips in Making Biscuits or Scones

• Always start with cold ingredients (flour, butter, milk and egg).
• Cut cold butter into dry ingredients. Squeeze with fingers until pieces of butter are chubby as peas.
• Bring the dough together lightly with a fork. Drier is better than wet. “Lightly” is more important than “together.”
• Gather the dough and cut it into any shapes: rounds, wedges, squares or rectangles.
• Pat and cut decisively for crisp clean edges which result in beautiful layers.
• Make-ahead option: Freeze the shaped scones and bake from frozen.

Print Recipe

Buttermilk Scones | Nigella Lawson

Serves: 8

Ingredients

• 340g/ 2 1/2 cups plain flour, plus extra for dusting (reduced 25% from 500g)
• 1 tbsp baking powder (added)
• 1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 2 tsp cream of tartar (not used)
• 2 tsp caster sugar
• pinch of salt
• 85g/ 6 tbsp/ 3 oz cold, unsalted butter (all butter)
• 25g/1oz soft vegetable shortening (skipped and added to butter allotment)
• 240 ml buttermilk (reduced by 20%), shaken
• 1 free-range egg, beaten, for an egg-wash (optional)

Instructions

1

Preheat the oven to 220C/450/Gas 7. Line a large baking sheet with baking parchment.

2

Put the dry ingredients into a bowl with flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, salt and sugar.

3

Cut butter into pieces and drop them into the flour.

4

Rub the fats into the flour using your fingertips – or just mix any old how – and then pour in the buttermilk, working everything together to form a dough.

5

Lightly flour your work surface. Pat the dough down into a round-edged oblong about 4cm/1½in thick, then cut out 6cm/2¼in scones with a fluted cutter. (I pat the batter into rounds in the cast-iron pan.)

6

Arrange the scones fairly close together on your lined baking sheet, and brush with beaten egg (to give golden tops), if you wish. Cook for 12 minutes, by which time the scones will be dry on the bottom and have a relatively light feel. Remove them to a wire rack to cool, and serve with clotted cream and jam.

Notes

https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/buttermilk_scones_99091