Parsnip Biscuits with Black Pepper and Honey

Each Thursday, Emily Vikre (a.k.a fiveandspice) will be sharing a new way to love breakfast -- because breakfast isn't just the most important meal of the day. It's also the most awesome.

Today: Leftover parsnip purée gets biscuited.

Our little guy is now six months old, which is apparently the age when you can start gently introducing solid foods to a baby’s diet. Espen (that’s our son’s name. It’s Norwegian. Surprise.) has been enthusiastically trying to steal our food from our hands and plates (not to mention attempting to drink from our coffee cups and beer glasses) since he was four months old, so we figured starting him on purées was going to be a piece of cake.  

Turns out, enthusiasm does not equate directly to consumption. He will stuff a spoonful of purée in his mouth like he hasn’t eaten in weeks, but then he has trouble figuring out what to do next. He spits half of it out, chokes on another portion of it, and finally manages to swallow a small amount. After polishing off maybe one to two teaspoons worth of food, he decides that’s enough and goes back to trying to steal our coffee. I’ve been told this is totally normal (well, not the coffee part), so that’s fine. But, I do keep winding up with a lot of extra purée.  

These biscuits were born of a cupful of parsnip purée that wasn’t getting eaten. I noticed a recipe for black pepper parsnip biscuits in the copy of Smoke and Pickles I just bought myself, and thought that maybe they’d be a good use of my purée. When I looked at the recipe, however, I discovered that Edward Lee has you do all sorts of fancy caramelizing to your parsnips before you purée them, which I’m sure is delicious, but didn’t suit my purpose at all. So, I decided simply to use a sweet potato biscuit recipe and pull a little parsnip switcheroo. It worked wonderfully. The earthy sweetness of the parsnips comes through while the freshly ground black pepper gives a pep talk to the butter’s richness. They’re fantastic with bacon or with eggs or just smeared with some more honey and butter. Now, I wonder what I can do with leftover broccoli purée...

Parsnip Biscuits with Black Pepper and Honey 

Makes about 10 to 12 biscuits

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 tablespoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
5 tablespoons cold, unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1/2 cup puréed parsnips (just simmer small chunks of parsnip until quite tender, then purée)
5 tablespoons honey
1/2 cup cold buttermilk, plus more as needed

See the full recipe (and save and print it) here.

Photos by Emily Vikre