A recipe for corny corn bread
This is quite possibly ruining the appeal of this whole endeavor, but I’ll put it out there anyway: sometimes picking which recipe to cook for each month stresses me out. It works best when one calls for mostly stuff I have, and a meal falls together naturally—for it to feel like a chore seems like it defeats the purpose. But sometimes a couple weeks have gone by and I realize I haven’t cooked anything new from the cookbook and here I am, facing a self-imposed deadline and in desperate needs of a recipe that doesn’t require getting fresh cod (a preview of an edition ahead, should I ever find myself in the mood to procure fresh cod).
This week, what I had a lot of was cheddar cheese, and a temperature that has suddenly decided that it’s fall, which meant that mac and cheese was the move, before I remembered that of course I had already made that for the newsletter, and many times before that. Cruising through the items we had in the fridge didn’t inspire much else; swiss chard could have become a soup but it’s (not to shoot my future self in the foot here) not one I’m very excited about.
Then I found the answer: corn bread with actual corn kernels in it. It just so happened my sister had grilled extra heads, and it needed using. My normal plan would have been to make a corn salad out of that, but I was happy to pivot. I don’t recall Corn on Corn Bread ever making it to my family table, and it doesn’t look like it came from our usual recipe sources (though its organized fashion and the use of the word “swiftly” suggests that it did come from somewhere other than my dad’s brain).
If I had really planned ahead, I would have made the recipe list directly above this one in Fave Recipes, which is for just regular corn bread, but I didn’t, and so that will forever live in the “could have been nice but wasn’t” category. Cornbread in whatever form is certainly in the category of dishes that have at the very least thousands of slightly similar recipes for them, ones where the tweaks can make a lot of difference, even if the end result is all roughly the same. The number of times I’ve decided to whip the egg whites to get fluffier pancakes pales in comparison to the number of times I’ve just made basic pancakes and been perfectly happy. This one got automatic points because of ease and that it there was a buttermilk substitute right there in the recipe. (I’ve been trying to have Greek yogurt around more because it keeps longer than milk and is good in a pinch, though of course there’s always the one day you open the container and it has been pushed far too long.)
This is all to say that cornbread is aggressively not hard, even if you are using fresh corn and not frozen. I used all of what I had, which came out to about 3 cups instead of 2, because more fresh corn seemed like more of a good thing. Once all the ingredients were “swiftly” blended together, everything was ready—I dumped it into the pan and put it in the oven. Towards the end, I was concerned it was done on the inside but not brown enough on top so I very briefly broiled it, but got a little scared about burning it or drying it out so there was just a smidge of color on top. It was certainly not attractive, per se, but the nice thing about cornbread is that it can be savory or sweet with just a little nudge to either direction. This recipe is light and fluffy, not dense, as I associate most cornbreads, more like a pound cake because of the flour content—plus, it makes a whole sheet pan’s worth. We’ve eaten it a few ways so far: topped with some maple syrup and butter or vanilla ice cream, as well as leftover tomato soup, and all has been very nice indeed. And isn’t that the kind of flexibility I was craving all along?
Donations time: Last month, $105 went to Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund. This month, donations will go to SF New Deal, which works with “local restaurants to create meals for neighbors in need, providing income for employees and food for our community.” You can sign up to become a donor to this newsletter for $5 a month or $30 a year here.