In My Trusty Iron Skillet

In my fantasy cooking life I am the kind of hardscrabble Southern cook who makes pie crust without checking the recipe, confidently bakes biscuits lighter than air, and handily serves pans of cornbread as a staple at nearly every meal. Neighbors rave about my pies. I store bacon grease in a jar (okay that I actually do). The kitchen shelves are stocked with jars of jelly and pickles and fruits that I home can and my hungry family devours around our ever expanding farm table. James comes in hungry every night after a hard day's work and dips wedges of our fluffy house specialty cornbread into creamy gravy.
I love cornbread -- slathered with butter, pan fried with eggs or doused in milk for the quintessential Southern midnight snack. James tolerates the occasional slice but he doesn't crave it or look wantonly at barbecue or beans when there isn't a skillet of bright yellow bread nearby.
And so, I curb my baser, cornier tendencies and these days I only make cornbread when the feeling is so Americana the day can't progress without a crispy crusted wedge of yellow goodness.
Memorial Day while I was serving sticky pork ribs, is one of those kind of days. Though I find it romantic I don't soak my cornmeal overnight in buttermilk the way old time cooks might. I never add sugar. As they say below the Mason Dixon line that clearly was some sort of Yankee invention. And, I never use flour -- just rough, crumbly cornmeal.

Preheat the oven to 450º
Cook 3-4 slices of bacon in a 9" iron frying pan until crisp. Set the bacon on a paper towel to drain and reserve 4 TB of the bacon fat, leaving the rest (at least 1 TB) in the pan).
Put iron frying pan withe the remaining bacon grease in eh oven to heat.
In a medium bowl combine 2 cups yellow cornmeal (I like coarse or medium grind), 1 tsp salt,  1/2 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp baking powder, and the cooled bacon chopped.
In a separate bowl beat together 1 1/2 cups buttermilk, 4 TB bacon fat reserved from the skillet, and one egg.
Stir the wet ingredients into the dry and mix until just combined.
Pour the batter into the heated iron frying pan and bake fro 20 minutes.
Serve piping hot from the skillet.

A taste of America for an American holiday.

Southern Style Cornbread

Finally home again.
Staring into a nearly empty fridge (I mean we are out of cheese -- when are we ever out of cheese?). A carton of milk well past it's expiration date stared back.
I could pour it down the commode hoping to revitalize our septic as I've read online. But, it's still food. I hate to throw food away, especially when a little creativity can make what some consider trash into a homemade meal. Food from nothing is my favorite game.
I think that's what I love so much about Southern cooking. The traditional cuisine of the American South is frugality at it's best. True nose to tail cooking born as much of scarcity as it is of a reverence for ingredients.
Staring at that milk I suddenly saw sour milk cornbread. A quick google search will bring up pages and pages of debate on baking with sour milk -- pasteurized vs raw, homogenized vs separated. Ignoring the warnings I pressed on.
I whisked two eggs and 2 cups of that sour milk, along with a teaspoon each of baking soda and baking powder -- for insurance sake. A pinch of salt, 1/4 cup of flour, 1 1/2 cups corn meal and 4 TB of melted butter finished my quick mixed batter. I placed my iron skillet with 1 TB of bacon grease (that's why I save it -- cornbread and french fries -- in a 400º oven long enough for the fat to melt and start to sizzle -- about 5 minutes. I gave the grease a swirl in the pan to spread it across the cooking surface and poured in my batter. After 20 minutes my cornbread was light and fluffy and not the least bit sour.
A nod to the South but not quite authentic. Here in California the grocery stores don't stock the finely ground white cornmeal treasured in the Southeast. Next time I travel I'll bring back a bag and try again -- I'm sure milk will be waiting.

Southern Vegetables

We couldn't resist the steam rising off tonight's dinner. James snapped this pic on the way to the table. A Southern style vegetable dinner, flavored -- to be more diet friendly -- with smoky flavored turkey bacon and chicken broth. Long cooking stewed green beans and potatoes, quickly sautéed bitter greens (turnip, radish, spring onions and mustard greens from our own garden) and buttery soft buttermilk cornbread for sopping up the flavorful "pot likker."

Together Again

James is finally home. Since he was traveling I made a pot of cider beans, a recipe that doesn't suffer from extra cooking time. Soaked beans are boiled for 30 minutes in apple cider and then baked with onions, salt pork (or slab bacon in this case), molasses and mustard for most of the day. Naturally I whipped up a pan of cornbread to mop of the gently sweet sauce.

Welcome home honey.

A Bright Yellow Wedge

It's actually possible to walk in the door and less than 25 minutes later have hot cornbread for dinner, if James will preheat the oven for me. I just pop 1 TB of butter or bacon grease, if I have it, into an iron skillet and let it melt in the pan in the hot oven. Meanwhile I mix together 2 cups of cornmeal, 1 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp salt, and a couple good grinds of pepper. In a separate bowl I beat together 1 1/2 cups of buttermilk, 1 egg and 2 TB of vegetable oil. I mix the wet ingredients into the dry, pour it all into the skillet with the hot fat and bake at 450º for 18-20 minutes. Crispy, fluffy, delicious and just the thing to go with my slow cooker BBQ pork ribs. Pretty good with butter and jam for breakfast too.

Well, It's Still Corn

"Honey," James called sweetly from downstairs. "Can we have dinner early tonight?'

I know that means he didn't eat lunch and couldn't see his way through the fridge to find a snack. I hadn't given one thought to dinner yet. "Of course," I said and then scrambled to come up with an idea.

Hmmm two birds with one stone? Two meals with one dish? Maybe I could get ahead on the holiday. I'm bringing the stuffing (although I guess it's not really stuffing since it's coming without the bird) to our event tomorrow. For me, stuffing calls for cornbread and so I made a double batch to have some for tomorrow and some for James' dinner tonight (maybe even some for breakfast) -- win, win, as they say. I still had a few links of that delicious Basque Sausage in the fridge and a bunch of broccolini so I sautéed the sausage (out of the casing) in a splash of olive oil and tossed in a good bit of chopped garlic and some leftover white beans I had cooked earlier in the week (bean and greens soup I think it was), just as the cornbread was coming out of the oven I stirred in some lightly blanched broccoli and gave it all a good turn before nestling it on the plate next to a good sized hunk of cornbread.

Normally I would serve a sauté like this with polenta, but this airy cornbread (4 Tb butter melted in a baking dish in the oven -- 1 1/2 cups corn meal, 1/2 cup flour, 1 tsp salt, 1 1/2 tsp baking powder, blended, mix in 1 1/4 cup milk and 1 egg whisked together -- mix wet ingredients into dry and pour into baking pan over the melted butter -- bake 30 minutes at 375º) had the right flavor, stood up to the zesty mix, and made tomorrow (and tonight) a little easier.

"You can make this for me any time," James declared between bites. Win. Win. Win.

Down Home Labor Day

Put away the white shoes for another season. Labor Day has come and gone, and with it goes the restless summer ramblings that makes us all feel like kids out of school well past our school years.

Certain days call for special foods. Thanksgiving demands pumpkin pie, Easter practically requires a ham, and no Valentine's Day is complete without chocolate. For me Labor Day has to have barbeque -- not grilled hamburgers and hot dogs, but real, slow cooked, patiently tended barbeque -- even when it's just for two. In theory, I suppose, it's the last lazy warm day with time to spare for tending cooking fires -- but it's also pretty easy to cheat. Dabbling with a recipe I found from the Bronx based owner of Mogridder's BBQ truck (not exactly down home, eh?), I cooked these sticky ribs in a slow oven (sprinkled with salt, pepper, garlic powder and cloves) wrapped in tin foil with a bottle of beer for moisture. After two hours I strained the pan drippings into a saucepan with 1 cup of ketchup, 1 cup of homemade spiced peach jam, and 3 TBs of lemon juice -- reduced the sauce down to a sticky glaze, brushed it over the already tender ribs and passed it under the broiler for convincing BBQ char.

Barbeque sides are usually simple treats, but somehow, as I am mourning the loss of a summer that never really was, tomato salad and corn on the cob seemed to mock the carefree days we missed. I moved towards fall with stewed green beans (pole beans as The Big Man would say) and new (homegrown) potatoes. These are Southern style vegetables no vegetarian would dare try -- bathed in bacon fat and rich chicken broth. A wedge of buttermilk cornbread, extra rich with plenty of melted sweet butter, stood by to gather up sticky sauce and tasty "pot liker" (hmm can it really be pot liker if you're not cooking greens?). Comfort food from the land of "meat and three" -- as far away from California cuisine as this gal can get.