So I had leftover buttermilk after making the Irish Soda Bread before St. Patrick’s Day.  I suggested that Tom make buttermilk pancakes while I was gone at my spinning retreat, but that did not happen.  So I had leftover when I came home.  I am not one to waste perfectly good food, and we do not have hogs now to help out.  So I have been on a mission to use this buttermilk up.

It started with making Jo Rooney’s Buttermilk Biscuits which I have made before.  They turned out great.  We used up some jam on them when they were hot out of the oven, and they have made some yummy slider sandwiches with them since.

I decided to search the NYT Cooking site which I subscribe to for buttermilk recipes and found quite a few.  The first one I tried was Buttermilk Blue Cheese Dressing.  This has been on my lunch salads for the last several days (minus my birthday).  It is good, but my blue cheese did not mash very well.  But still a good use for leftover buttermilk if you have blue cheese lingering in your refrigerator.

Yesterday I made Berry Buttermilk Cake.  This served several purposes.  It used up buttermilk but also some of the umpteen blueberries we have frozen from our harvest last year.  Plus it was a late birthday cake for me since I had a cowboy cookie for my actual birthday (not dissing the cookie at all, it was wonderful).  The cake was really good.  The blueberries tended to migrate to the bottom, but the buttermilk effect was really nice.  This recipe is a keeper.

Next from my NYT search came Nordic Whole Grain Rye Bread.  This also served the purpose of using rye berries which I impulsively purchased at Boldly Grown Farm at Christmas time. This recipe calls for medium rye flour and cracked rye berries.  I had some purchased rye flour but wanted to use these berries I had.  So I pulled out some antique coffee grinders I have.  The one on the left ground the berries more coarsely.  I called these cracked berries but honestly many of them came out seemingly untouched.  The grinder on the right ground more finely and made what I consider a coarse flour.  So this is what I used in the recipe with the rye flour we had.  For some reason I did not have the sunflower seeds called for, but this didn’t seem very authentically Nordic so I used rye berries instead.

I was somewhat authentic as I used mörk sirap for the molasses called for.

Despite my cultured buttermilk and the yeast, this dough did not rise well.  It ended up being a very dense bread with very chewy rye berries.  It does seem very Viking so I enjoy that, but there are certainly better rye breads currently in this world.  But it was fun to make and to eat.  And I used up a whole 1/3 cup of buttermilk!

Finally I was able to finish off the buttermilk with Fried Turkey Nuggets.  This recipe came through my email recently from one of my favorite cooks. And I happened to have a turkey breast lurking in our freezer (I used half of it).  So this was our dinner this evening.

It was a really fun dinner, and we tried various refrigerator sauces with it.  And now the buttermilk is gone.  No more creative buttermilk recipes until the next time.