City Island Southern Girl: Two New Recipes - Hot Pockets and Biscuits (Both Filled with Veggies)

Since reading that many cheeses have pork in them (rennet, enzymes) I decided the other day to learn how to make my own. (I can't make colby or cheddar or any kind like that, but I can make the white cheeses, such as ricotta and cottage cheese. Well, I made my own ricotta the other day, and another cheese I found, which they didn't give it's name, (that post is here), but I didn't really know what to do with them. I just made a little bit for a test so I didn't have enough to make lasagna or anything like that. So last night I got to thinking about what I could do with it, as i was afraid that it would spoil soon, and came up with the idea of hot pockets.

I started out by mixing the two cheeses that I had made into one. They were both saved in the same container, so I just mixed them with a spoon.

Then I made some biscuit dough. The recipe for that is here. The only thing I did differently was that I rolled the dough out thinner than I do for biscuits - much thinner. Then I took a pizza cutter and cut the dough out into rectangles, and I added a smidgen of cheese to half.

I had some broccoli, mushrooms and tomatoes chopped up and added a little on top of the cheese.

Then I folded the empty half over and went around pinching up all the open sides. It made six. Some are larger and some are smaller, as I did not have a uniform pattern while cutting out the rectangles of dough. They have an egg wash on them.

I baked them at 450 for about 10 minutes, took them out and cut them open and added a little spaghetti sauce. This is store-bought sauce. We have been making our own, but we didn't have any sun-dried tomatoes here last night and no one on the island sells them. Here is a picture of the finished product. It has a fresh basil leaf on it for decor purposes.

So I chopped up too much mushrooms, tomatoes and broccoli and wondered what to do with it. This morning I was looking for healthy recipes, and ran across a recipe for tomato biscuits. Now, being from the south, I have baked a lot of biscuits, sliced them open and added some butter, a slice of fresh tomato and some salt, but this recipe called for adding fresh tomato, sun-dried tomato and scallion to the dough and baking it in. I would add the link, but I was on my husband's computer at the time and I don't have it in my history here, but anyway, it gave me the idea to make biscuits and to add my chopped up veggies there.

So I made biscuits dough - the same way as I directed above, except after I added the milk I then stirred in the vegetables. And I didn't knead the bread, nor did I roll it out. I simply spoon dropped it onto the baking sheet, and I baked these at 450 for about 8-10 minutes.

While I was preparing the biscuits, my husband was kind enough to whip up some butter.