Cornmeal – Southern Fusion Cooking

Home Cooking–All Local New Year’s Meal

Let’s Eat!

Way back in the 1970’s Neil Young had it right with his song “Homegrown.” Here are the first few lines:

Homegrown’s alright with me
Homegrown is the way it should be
Homegrown is a good thing
Plant that bell and let it ring
“Homegrown”

We didn’t start out with the idea that we were going to ring in the New Year with an all local feast, but it just turned out that way. I’ll start at the top, and go left to right around the plate, and then right to left.

Top: Baked Sweet Potato. That’s half of a big one, purchased from the Festhalle Farmer’s Market. These were grown by long time family friends, and are probably the variety “Porto Rican.” These are very sweet, and are served with lots of butter–a dessert substitute.

Left Center: Corn Bread. This is an all corn meal recipe, using McEwan and Sons Fine Ground Cornmeal. I doubt that the Certified Organic Corn was grown in Alabama, but their business, Coosa Valley Milling, just south of Birmingham, has some national fame. Their meal and grits are used at multiple James Beard award winning restaurants, and you can buy their products online–all around good stuff.

Bottom: Collard Greens. These are local as well, purchased at the Festhalle, and then frozen by yours truly. I like mine with lots of home made pepper sauce. The inheritance of bottles of such has been the subject of legal battles.

Right Top: Locally grown fresh Ham. Until this year, this was practically impossible to find. The ham pictured was home brined as well, and I will give the process of home brining, “curing,” in an upcoming post.

Center: Black-eyed Peas. More than likely these were grown by my in-laws, Melanie Jane’s sister and her husband, who brought us bags of them. That’s the way to pay a visit to some one. Southern folklore has it that every pea consumed is worth a dollar. I should be a millionaire.

The wine to wash this down with is local, if you live on the Rhône river in France. It’s a Côtes du Rhône, which has just enough pink tinge to call it a rosé.

This is as classic a Southern New Year’s meal as can be put together. People in NYC would probably label it “Soul Food.” Down here, we just call it food.

Sage “Berggarten”

Due to the ever increasing vagaries of our climate, no doubt caused by Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (the technical term for Global Warming), our herb gardening is now confined to containers. We have one sage plant that is at least ten years old, and it has to be root bound like nobody’s business. Then I saw this plant, with the German name of Berggarten (Mountain Garden), at our local plant seller. That made it a done deal.

Yikes! I planted it in this giant Mexican terra cotta container with a white Martagon lily, and the sage began growing like it was trying to escape back to the mountains of Deutschland. (I probably should add that the plant is in fact named after one of the gardens of Herrenhausen Palace in Hanover, Lower Saxony, which is not on a mountain). The interwebs descriptions call the plant “compact.” Draw your own conclusion.

Fortunately, the taste of this plant equals its magnitude. No holiday around here is complete without some cornbread dressing that tastes of sage as much as it does of cornbread. I can see a serious herb drying project in my near future.

Summer’s First Vegetable Soup

We jumped ahead of schedule, or maybe just jumped the shark, making this soup, as we had to work with a bunch of non-ordinary ingredient sources. In about a couple of more weeks, we will be able to make this with all fresh local ingredients. But sometimes you just can’t wait.

Ingredients

Chicken Stock

Crowder Peas

3 Ears of Fresh Corn

A small Onion

Butter Beans

Large can of Tomatoes

Salt and Pepper

Half of our ingredients were local, but the rest were scrounged for. We did have stock made from a locally grown chicken, which is unusual. The corn was fresh from the Festhalle, and the butter beans were from there as well, but they were hiding in the dim reaches of our freezer. The okra was really excellent and fresh, again from the Festhalle market. Here’s where we go worldwide.

Crowder peas are not yet in season, and hard to find fresh anyway, so we used dried peas from the famous Camellia brand from New Orleans. New Orleans folks consume as many Fagioli (beans) as Tuscany, and this brand controlled 95% of the market. They are that good. Cook these first.

The onion was an organic onion from California, and the big can of tomatoes was organic as well, but they were San Marzanos from Italy. I just happened to have some cans of them in my pantry.

MJ and I enjoyed this with some fresh corn muffins, made with McEwen cornmeal.The leftover soup will be frozen for the winter. The left over muffins were devoured by our chickens.

Deconstructed Turkey

Sometimes you have to do what you have to do. In this case, it was Easter Turkey, instead of Easter Ham. I can’t say that I have any reason to complain about the result.

The backstory: I wasn’t about to drive to the BHAM to buy a quality ham, so we fished out a 20+ pound turkey from our freezer, a Christmas gift from MJ’s employer. It was time to go all Julia Child and Jacques Pepin on this bird.

Like Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill, I needed Japanese steel for this job. There are five cuts necessary for this dish, and I pulled out MJ’s massive Japanese cleaver. Cutting off the wing tips, and throwing them into the stock pot, are the two easy ones. Then the thighs/legs come off in one piece each. Finally, the back is removed, and it joins the wing tips in the stock pot. I forgot that the giblets get boiled. Those are for giblet gravy.

Brine the Turkey parts overnight in a standard salty brine, and make the stock and a large skillet full of cornbread to use as the base for the dressing. My cornbread has no flour in it, because I use the fine ground McEwen and Sons organic cornmeal. Other wise, it’s a typical cornbread. The next day, it’s time to reconstruct the bird.

The bird rests on a big pile of Cornbread Dressing, which consists of a regular, crumbled cornbread, egg, turkey stock, cooked celery and onion dressing, with two important additions. A. D. Livingston says include a cup of croutons for some crunch, and my addition is a good hand full of reconstituted dried porcini mushrooms, which are chopped and added after soaking, along with some of the porcini water, to add a little mushroom flavor to the dressing.

Put the bird back together in a manner resembling how it looked before it was dismembered. We also baste ours regularly with melted butter while it cooks, in a 375 degree F oven. That dark brown color is a good indictor of the fowl being cooked through. That big French roasting pan is quite an improvement over the gigantic cast iron skillet we formerly used. All the meaty part of a twenty pound turkey in a ten pound skillet will strain the sturdiest oven rack.

So thanks to Julia and Jacques for forever ending the stuffing of a Turkey cavity. These brined birds stay juicy and tender, and the legs can be removed early, if they cook faster than the breast does. Put them back in to re-warm just before the cooking is finished, and you once again have a reconstructed Deconstructed Turkey.

Burning Food

I just have to begin with one of my favorite poems. This was actually the first poem I ever taught in a college class, when I was an old man of twenty.

“I Celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

Who would have thought Walt Whitman was into atomic theory? That influenced me into turning these crap taco shells, and their crap packaging, into their individual atoms.

Hereby hangs a tale.

My wife Melanie Jane decided she had a hankering for some really crispy Tacos, of the restaurant variety. I said I could make some shells, but she insisted that I buy some instead. I trucked on off to our local supermarket, and they had a grand total of one brand for sale. The package said “Made with three ingredients,” so I assumed that was better than a M*Donald’s bun, that was made with fifty.

Wrong, because three wrongs do not make a right. One or two of the three ingredients were said to be “genetically engineered,” which is a weasel way of saying genetically modified. The “Limed corn flour” was the obvious first choice, but then there was also the vein clogging palm oil. Pick your poison.

I had to do some genetic engineering myself. These jokers were about to be lit.

These taco shells were far too bad to donate to a food bank. No one should have to eat garbage just because they are poor. Perhaps these atoms can be reincarnated into something useful.

A man can always dream.

Classic Southern

It’s so Sad that Julia Child had to invent good American Cooking all by Herself

From native foods like grits and corn bread, to introduced European specialties such as ice cream and macs and cheese, the South has something of a history with food. The included recipes here are particularly Southern, and there will be NO FRIED CHICKEN (even though I trained as a chicken fryer with the Kentucky Colonel’s business).

Better Know a Southern Staple

Grits or Polenta? Either way, it’s Boiled Ground Corn.

Ingredients here that are specific to the South, though the Grits/Polenta controversy lives on, and probably will, as long as people boil ground corn.

Corn Meal Bread (1824)

Corn Meal bread I only took one small bite. I swear.

This is Mary Livingston’s original recipe from the 1824 classic The Virginia Housewife. Here’s the original recipe:

Corn Meal Bread

Rub a piece of butter the size of an egg, into a pint of corn meal–Make it a batter with two eggs, and some new milk–add a spoonful of yeast, set it by the fire an hour to rise, butter little pans, and bake it.

Using yeast as a leavening agent makes for a slightly finer texture than with baking powder cornbread, as I discovered when I made this. Here’s the recipe I used:

1 cup stone-ground cornmeal

1 tablespoon melted butter

1 egg

1/2 cup milk

Salt (not enough)

1 teaspoon yeast, dissolved in 1 tablespoon of water

Butter the pan, or do what I did, and lube up the pan with lard.

Salt and a little water were my only additions to the original recipe. Keeping it old school, I cooked it over hot coals. Temp was uneven, but cast iron cooks better than almost anything.

Fire The corn meal bread is in the #10 dutch oven, which was a little too large. A chicken and vegetables are in the larger pot. Man cannot live on corn meal bread alone.

The result? Would have been a grand slam with more salt. Still, this is a superior recipe. More people should try cornbread made with yeast. I’ll make it again for Thanksgiving.

Stone-Ground Grits

Don’t waste your time on anything but stone-ground grits, which are superior in every way, from taste to nutrition.

Recipe

This is a basic recipe for a couple of people, to which many things can be added, the most common being grated cheese.

1/2 cup stone-ground grits

2 cups milk

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon butter

Pepper to taste.

Heat the milk and salt, and add grits gradually. Stir regularly for 25-30 minutes, until the grits soften and gain a smooth texture. DO NOT LET THIS BURN, or you may be buying a new pan. Add more liquid as needed. When done, add the butter or other fat (apparently the native Americans of Virginia used bear fat), and pepper if desired. Serve hot.

As a whole grain, stone-ground grits last longer if refrigerated, or even kept in the freezer. Our local brand, McEwen and Sons, is excellent, but just about anyone has access to stone-ground grits these days.

Uses for leftovers are manifold, one of the most common being “Grit Cakes.” If you really get addicted, buy the book Glorious Grits, which was written by Susan McEwen McIntosh.

Grits–Better Know a Southern Staple

I grits

Instant grits? Really?

My alcoholic writing Professor at the University of Alabama would often repeat the following: “College is like a grit factory. You all come in looking different, and then you all leave looking exactly the same: bland and lily white.” There is some truth to that, as my Alma Mater has now devolved into a country club with a football team. But that’s a subject for a different kind of blog.

The Prof had one thing right: grits back then were pretty horrible. Multiple James Beard award winning chef Frank Stitt says, “the life had been processed out of them.” There were none worse than those served at UA cafeterias. Mine would be so hard that they needed to be cut with a knife, and were topped with a pat of margarine, that would bleed across the top like a yellow oil slick. If the settlers at Jamestown had been given those, they would have jumped back on the boat, and headed back to England.

But that is where grits came from. It is a certifiable, documentable, dish that came directly from the Native Americans of Virginia. The English in 1607 couldn’t handle the native name “rockahominie,” so the dish became “hominy grits,” a term which a real old school type will still use. Now they are just grits, and we are living in something of a grits renaissance.

Before I get to that, let’s have a quick rundown of modern grits.

Instant Grits

These jokers come in a little paper bag for the culinarily impaired. I risk it all with this comment: there is hardly a better backpacking/camping food. It’s inexpensive, goes with anything, conserves fuel and weight, and can be eaten with any meal. Also packs some serious carbs. Also does not have the sodium punch that something like ramen noodles have. With that said, I will not eat these at home.

Quick Grits

More flavor than the instant ones, but still highly processed. Cooks in around five minutes.

Grits

High speed ground corn that takes a while to cook. Buy a bag of these, throw the grits into the compost, and use the bag for something else.

Stone Ground Grits

Here’s the ticket. There are both national and local brands available now, and the quality varies from excellent to superb. I go with the organic ones to make sure there are no weird genes in my grits, as in GMO. Our local brand, McEwen & Sons, is served at everything from breakfast joints to some of the best fine dining restaurants in the country, including the James Beard most Outstanding Restaurant in the US in 2018, Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham.

Grits White, but not bland.

Recipe

This is a basic recipe for a couple of people, to which many things can be added, the most common being grated cheese.

1/2 cup stone-ground grits

2 cups milk

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon butter

Pepper to taste.

Heat the milk and salt, and add grits gradually. Stir regularly for 25-30 minutes, until the grits soften and gain a smooth texture. DO NOT LET THIS BURN, or you may be buying a new pan. Add more liquid as needed. When done, add the butter or other fat (apparently the natives of Virginia used bear fat), and pepper if desired. Serve hot.

Uses for leftovers are manifold, one of the most common being “Grit Cakes.” If you really get addicted, buy the book Glorious Grits, which was written by Susan McEwen McIntosh.

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Corn Meal Bread

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Instant Grits

Quick Grits

Grits

Stone Ground Grits

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