Dinner tonight was fresh biscuits topped with deconstructed roasted tomato and garlic bruschetta.

See what I did there? Made dinner sound like something you'd pay a fortune for (or I would, anyway) if you ordered it off a restaurant menu? Really what "deconstructed" means is I ate what calorically counted as dinner standing up over the stove, mopping sticky, olive-oily tomato juices and teak-coloured cloves of garlic off the roasting pan with chunks of warm biscuit. It was so good I couldn't even make it to the table. When Mike and W came downstairs, they got leftover warmed soup and eggs on toast, respectively. I realize this sounds like far more of a summer meal than one you'd make while knocking on winter's door. (Hell, who are we kidding? Winter opened its door and invited us in a week ago.) But I happened to have stopped in at Forage this afternoon to pick up the assorted 80s CDs they borrowed, and happened to notice the giant stack of freshly baked biscuits strategically placed beside the cash register. I mean LOOK AT THEM. Humuna humuna.

They totally taste like they look. I weaseled the recipe out of Wade, but it's his aunt's recipe, and so I was made to swear it would never leave my house. He does however teach biscuit-making classes, and they're well worth the hour or so you get to spend hanging out with him in the kitchen. You can check out all his fun events here. Hey guess what? As I was typing that last sentence I got an email from Wade, completely unpestered on my part, saying OK fine, you can go ahead and post the recipe on your blog. Because your readers are so great. OK, that last part was just me. Look! Here it is! Thanks Wade! I'm a little giggled that he blends the butter and flour the same way I do - in a food processor.

FORAGE BUTTERMILK BISCUITS

yield: 10 biscuits

1/2 lb. Butter (1/4 inch dice)

4 cups Highwood Crossing Flour

2 Tbsp. Granulated Sugar (white)

1 ½ Tbsp. Baking Powder

½ tsp. Salt

2 each Sunworks Farm Organic Eggs

1 cup Vital Green Farms Organic Buttermilk

1) Place butter in the food processor. Add flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Process until coarse crumb (about 12 seconds).

2) In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs and buttermilk together. Stir into flour. Knead until dough just comes together.

3) Roll the dough out to a 1" thickness. Cut into rounds. Press leftover dough together and roll smooth. Cut remaining rounds. Place on a parchment lined baking sheet. Bake at 400F for 8 minutes. Turn the pan. Bake another 7-10 minutes until golden and light when you pick them up.

I ate one straight up, and another half with peach jam. But they were the best with those aforementioned roasted tomatoes. I happened to be roasting some for tomato soup for a Christmas lunch I'm cooking (again, in Red Deer) tomorrow, and when I pulled the sheet out of the oven I was smacked with the memory of that bruschetta scene in Julie & Julia - you know, the one that tips right over the edge to full-on food porn? They slice voluptuous red heirloom tomatoes and eat them on toasted bread rubbed with cut garlic and drizzled with olive oil, and it looks so fantastically good - like crazy good - like these biscuits good. So why not combine them?

A classic bruschetta involves tomatoes, olive oil, garlic and fresh basil. I was pretty spare in the fresh basil department, but to be honest I would have found it too summery and it would have competed with the roasted tomatoes. Roasting them salvages less-than-peak-of-summer varieties, and allows them to still spill down your chin, like they might in summer if you're lucky. I quartered smallish tomatoes, peeled a few cloves of garlic, sprinkled the lot with salt and pepper and roasted them at 450F until they started to blister, then scooped it all up into my mouth with warm biscuits. (I could have let them cool and then coarsely chopped them, if I had any more class.)

I can't stop thinking about how much better even the bruschetta might have been with Parmesan biscuits - hello? Skip the grating of Parm on top of the bruschetta, and tuck it straight into the biscuit. Add it along with the dry ingredients is what I'd do. Not that I'm suggesting you mess with Wade's aunt's recipe.

Thanks Wade!