Make your own "saltines" crackers

Kim and I made some creamy potato soup today. She is the one who actually made it; I was just the knife man in charge of chopping onions, celery and garlic. It was mighty tasty. But for me, soup without crackers is like a fried egg without toast, and we had no crackers. Solution: make your own saltines or oyster crackers. It's pretty quick and simple.

Ingredients:

• 4 cups flour
• 2 tsp sugar
• 1 tbs salt
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 stick butter
• a little more than 1 cup cream or whole milk (no cream in the house so I opted for whole milk)

Toss the dry ingredients in the food processor and give it a pulse or two. Cut the butter into 1/2" chunks and add to the flour mixture. Pulse until it's well blended. You might have to take the lid off a few times and work the butter around and into the flour by hand if it doesn't seem to be integrating well; I think it depends on the processor you have.

After everything's well-blended run the machine while pouring the milk (or cream) in, until you get a nice stiff dough. Form the dough into a ball, wrap in plastic wrap and set in the fridge for a half-hour (or an hour, if you're going to go pick some apples like I did after making the dough).

Set your oven to 400º and line a baking sheet or two with parchment paper. Flour the counter and roll the dough out to 1/4" thickness. Cut it into cracker-shaped squares (or into little rounds like oyster crackers...I made mine square even though the final product is more like an oyster cracker in flavor and texture than a saltine). Brush some cream or milk on the crackers and sprinkle with cracked pepper and sea salt (I used red sea salt just because I like how the color shows up on the cracker). Bake until they start to brown (took about 18 minutes in my oven). Let 'em cool and there you go!

Take that, Nabisco!