Y’all Share! – Page 18

Cornbread International

Here’s a perfect example of why M and I toil at this here blog!

Back in April, we slung up a post about stew that also had a recipe tagged onto the end of it for cheesy corn bread. We didn’t think too much of it really until we got an email from Kym and Nerida of South Australia. Seems the Bells, fellow foodies who love Tex Mex, caught the blog and got intrigued by the cornbread recipe.

The catch, (There’s always a catch), was that they couldn’t find genuine corn meal in their neck of the woods. They’d tried the best alternative, which turned out to be corn grits used to make polenta. Their note finished with the comment that, while good, they weren’t sure that what they’d made was what we intended. M and I, quite sure that it wasn’t, and wanting Kym and Nerida to enjoy the real McCoy, snagged a bag of locally milled corn meal, threw in some of our homegrown dried chiles and sent a box winging it’s way literally across the globe.

About a month later, Kym let us know that the Eagle had landed, noting that he was “probably now on all sorts of watch lists, after receiving a couple of pounds of mysterious powder from the Americas.”

Shortly thereafter, they got to try the recipe as intended and had this report.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you with our corn bread experiment. This documentation of preparing a meal is much more complicated that we thought and we have a new appreciation of folk like you who do this as a regular process.

I’ve attached some photographs to an email which follows this (I wasn’t sure about your bandwidth). These were taken with my phone and we were in the kitchen after dark with artificial light, so the quality is not high. Nerida was actually doing the real stuff and I was trying to record it without dropping me or my phone into anything wet or hot.

We used your recipe as outlined on the blog site, with only a single substitution, which was using oil instead of shortening. We had no solid shortening in the house with the exception of butter, which didn’t seem appropriate here. Nerida bakes regular French style bread with oil, so we thought that was OK.

The pan we used is a muffin pan, and we had an idea of how many holes we could fill with the batter from our previous experiments. We’re going to look out for an appropriate pan that is similar to the one you use, so that we get something more like a mini loaf shape in the future.

First up: when we originally decided to try the corn bread recipe we found various websites run by expat US folk who said that fine ground polenta works well for the main ingredient, cornmeal. (Polenta is common in Australia in the Italian community in particular.) We would disagree. It could be that we haven’t yet tracked down the right brand of polenta, but we used the finest grind we could find, and got quite different results compared to the cornmeal you sent us. The main issue, which was quite disconcerting, was that in the soaking phase you recommend our polenta and milk mixture turned into almost a solid mass, a bit like sand after the tide has gone out. It still worked once the other stuff was mixed in, but it wasn’t what you would call a pouring batter and the crumb of the finished product was quite coarse. (Still tasted good!)

As a side issue, it seems that what normal folk do with ‘grits’ in the southern states of the US is what happens with polenta here. The difference is that polenta (outside Italian households) is a staple of fine dining restaurants, we regularly see main courses served on a shallow bed of polenta or wedges of fried polenta used as a garnish.

The stuff you sent was much better than polenta, and behaved exactly as you outlined in your recipe, right down to being easy to pour into the baking pan.

We had a bit of running to the computer to convert quantities and temperatures to metric, but aside from that the instructions were clear.

The end result was lovely: plenty of that corn taste, a nice and delicate crumb and an excellent texture. Good for dipping into sauce, too. Our vegetarian daughter certainly thought they were pleasant. Mind you, they are fairly solid little things which pile up on you quickly, so we got to try leftovers the next day. We were surprised how well they kept, given that they are unleavened. We now have an appreciation of the part of corn bread in cuisine from areas where corn is common.

By the way, we served it with our version of ‘a pot of red’, which gets around the beans or no beans controversy by putting a layer of beans on the bottom of the pot, on top of which the chili meat mixture itself is ladled before heating in the oven.

Thanks again for the very generous gesture in providing us with the raw material.

I’m going to experiment with your dried chiles in our next Tex Mex venture, and we have some ideas for using them in some SE Asian dishes we prepare, too. We’re thinking of trying to dry our own home grown chiles when we plant out later this year: normally we just use them up fresh and end up oversupplied.

Now we have to find out if there is some variety of similar cornmeal available here, and if so under what name it is hiding.

Kym and Nerida

Here’s Kym’s great pics of their adventure –

Was that a ball, or what? We’re absolutely thrilled to have taken part in this long-distance foodie adventure, and even more so with making new friends down under!

With a Little Help from my Friends

The other day, a meeting brought all the Managers together. While that’s not uncommon, the location for this one was. We met at the main warehouse for the North Texas Food Bank.

This NTFB facility was impressive, let me tell you. It’s huge, stacked with shelves a good 20’+ high, all loaded with pallets and pallets of food. There’re sections for canned and boxed and bagged goods, for fresh produce, another for frozen and refrigerated, the whole works. This place easily covers several acres.

After our meeting, we all volunteered for a few hours. The Coordinator explained that while they had so many paid staff members, a great deal of the work needed to get food to the people must be done by volunteers. She also noted that it was a Monday, and that volunteers were especially hard to come by on weekdays.

We were split into two teams and assigned tasks. One group would load a box of staples; basic foods that would provide a family with roughly a week’s worth of meals. The other team would go through food donated by groceries and distributors, separating the wheat from the chaff, if you will; they had to find and sort food which could be passed on to needy folks, and discard stuff that was either not suitable, expired, or otherwise not usable. Junk food was definitely among the latter group.

Let me tell you, a group of 50 some bakery-café managers is likely more horsepower than the average bunch of volunteers. We’re used to hard physical work done at production speed, and it showed.

I was with the stable box loaders. Twenty five of us lined up and packed a constantly moving line of boxes with canned meat, fruit and veggies, (None in syrup, and all pretty darn healthy versions; I checked), beans, pasta, dry and boxed milk, (1%, no hormones or other nasty junk), cereal dry and cooked. It took 48 of those boxes, roughly 16” x 12” X 12”, to make up a pallet. We packed and stacked 10 pallets of ‘em, 480 boxes, in about 2 ½ hours.

Four hundred and eighty boxes; not bad, huh?

Not bad at all, except that this one entity, NTFB, feeds roughly 90,000 hungry people every day. That’s a nine with four zeros, gang… Fact is, according to the Coordinator, if they were reaching everyone who needs help in north Texas, just the 16 or so counties of north Texas, mind you, they’d need to be feeding 300,000 a day.

Sobering, isn’t it?

Fact is, NTFB is relatively blessed. They don’t have to buy all the food they distribute. Those grocers and distributors generously donate a decent chunk of what goes out. Again though, without volunteers and donations, NTFB would and could fail.

Then what would happen to those 300,000 fellow human beings?

A brief video we watched prior to getting down to work showed who gets this food: Single moms with little ones, and seniors on a fixed income, many others. These folks often live in places where there is literally no store that sells what they really need within a distance they can get to. They don’t have cars, of course. Often enough, they must make a daily choice between eating and rent. The NTFB has adopted a hub and spoke model, working with small, local distribution points, to get the food out to those counties, to the folks who need it.

I’m sorry to say that it took an eye opener like this for me to wake up.

Wherever you are, there is an NTFB, or a derivative thereof.

Find them, and pitch in.

Donate food, money, your time, care, and energy.

Next time you’re at the grocery and they ask at the register if you want to donate a buck, or five, or ten to The Your-Town-Here food bank, don’t even think about it. Imagine the NTFB, and/or the none near you, that big warehouse, empty, because nobody cared.

Then say yes.

Always say yes.

What’s that meal worth, anyhow?

I understand that ‘real’ food sides have nutritional information for each and every thing they post. I’m here to state, formally and for the record, this ain’t that kinda site… Now, if I did this full time, and the readers wanted or demanded it, I’d do it, but so far, it ain’t happenin’.

Truth be told, we, nor the vast majority of folks we know, calculate the nutritional value of every meal. In fact, we do it very rarely. I understand that more folks are getting interested in the concept, and that’s good. Personally, I advocate recipe analysis more for taste and enjoyment than anything else… That said, we do pay strict attention to what we grow, buy, use and enjoy and so should you; that is why this blog is here!

Now, if your health or predilection lead you to the need for in depth nutritional analysis of everything you eat, you should without fail do so! In that light, there are recipes and ingredients in here that might not be the best thing for you. Our savvy members will email, post an IM, etc, and ask about alternatives to something posted, or request a custom recipe excluding the things they don’t want / can’t have, and we’re always happy to fill those requests, but what about the silent majority?

Fear not, we gotcha covered… First off, I researched nutritional calculators for the iphone, hoping for a useful, portable app, but alas, I found mostly crap and much that falls short of the goal. I did, however, find an worthwhile online version that seems to work well. You’ll now find a link to Calorie Count’s recipe nutrition analyzer herein. I chose this because it works well, is simple and fast, and gives accurate results, (As best I can tell.)

The coolest attribute of the site is that you can copy and paste recipes from here right into the calculator, and then with minimal editing, get useful results. If and when it does not recognize something, it will note such and offer interpretations that seem to be spot on. For example, I tested the Southwest Pepper Steak recipe, and found that it did not understand Hatch chiles as I’d written it, but offered a drop down to clarify, from which I chose fresh hatch chiles and off we went.

You can quickly, (and endlessly) edit/tweak the recipe once its analyzed, to see what substitutions will do for you, etc. It is, I must say, very handy for sniffing out where bad stuff like saturated fat, cholesterol, etc lie within a recipe, (Which is not always as obvious as we might think!) It’s actually kinda fun to play with!

Give it a try yourself and let us know what you think. And if you know of, use, or find something better, let us know about that, too!