Flowers

So I guess summery weather isn’t very conducive to making regular blog entries about food despite all of the summery foods we’ve been enjoying. We’ve been doing lots of entertaining and outdoor cookery (to the tune of requiring another BBQ tank refill) and enjoying the fruits of our yard maintenance labours.

A few weeks ago the sprogs and I planted the contents of a packet of edible flowers my mum dropped off – nasturtiums and marigolds and cornflowers…oh my! Eating things one has grown one’s self is very gratifying, however 10 and almost 12 year olds who grow their own plants don’t have quite the same perspective on that whole thing as I might. This has become a fierce competition. The daughter’s plants sprouted first – just days after planting them. Then came the son’s. I sowed a lowly pot of nasturtiums and tried to impress upon the ankle-biters that they take longer to gestate, but they were convinced that they simply weren’t going to come up.

After a few days of having my poor nasturtiums scorned I went out to find this:

Ha! My nasturtiums win!

Soon enough I’ll have lovely, big, peppery flowers to stuff with ricotta and chives =)

Cornbread

Lazy Sundays at our house tend to lead to one of my favourite lazy Sunday breakfasts: grilled steak, fresh cornbread and pico di gallo. Today I’m making the cornbread and pico di gallo bits to take to a potluck we’re attending this evening, so it’s a good time to share lazy Sunday recipes as it’s an industrious Saturday and I’m not pre-occupied with spending as much time in my pyjamas, exerting as little energy as humanly possible.

I tend to like my cornbread more on the dense and crispy and yellow side than on the light and fluffy side as it holds up better to the various abuses I will inflict upon it in the interest of making it OTT yummy. This, however, is counter-intuitive to the cornmeal’s efforts toward self-actualisation; it’s very much its own leavening agent so sometimes I add a little extra butter to keep that cornmeal down. Though the verdict’s out on whether proper cornbread should be sweetened or purely savoury, I’m in favour of adding sugar to mine for the same reason I like it dense and crispy – it holds up better to whatever I put with and in it. Here’s the basic recipe:

Ingredients

1 cup yellow cornmeal
1 cup flour
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup melted butter
2 eggs
1 cup milk or buttermilk

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl mix the dry ingredients. In another mix the wet ones. Stir the wet ones into the dry ones until they’re all coated in each other. Toss the lot in a greased 8×8 baking dish. Bake for about 25 minutes or until the edges are golden brown. Easy peasy.

Variations

This is the fun part of cornbread. To today’s batch I added 1 and a half cups of grated old cheddar cheese and about 2 tablespoons of roughly chopped chipotles to the bread. Other yummy additions could be dill and lemon peel, chopped jalepenos, onions, red or green peppers…the list goes on. This stuff’s great because it’s so easily adapted to whatever you’re serving with it. It can quickly become a one-dish, vegetarian meal by thinning the batter over a larger surface and topping it with seasoned tofu, beans and oven-worthy vegies like mushrooms, peppers, zucchinis, etc…Or one could simply add taco seasoning, if one believed in that sort of thing.

mmmMMMmmmm…cornbread:

Alright, I promise that my next post will be more atkins-friendly.