Tag: corn

Due to Tele falling ill this week, I was in charge of the Thanksgiving meal. I had no choice but to step up and accomplish the task. So, I did. I made the whole meal.

I forgot to take pre-eating pictures of the Thanksgiving table, but I did get you the after pics.

The left side of the table in clockwise order: mashed potatoes, Praline Yams, Whole Cranberry Sauce, Cranberry Relish, StoveTop Cornbread Stuffing, and HoneyBaked Ham.

The right side of the table starting from the back of the table and moving forward: Dutch Apple Pie with Never-Fail Pie Crust, Sweet Corn Muffins, Cranberry Salad, CornBread, Honey Maid Cinnamon Sticks and Bees for the fluff, Fluff with fresh strawberries, PineCone Spread with Original Triscuits.

Not pictured but included in the food lineup of the evening: Corn on the cob roasted under the broiler and Chatham Village Cranberry Herb Stuffing.

The only thing I didn't get to make was my grandma's Pumpkin Cookies. But the apple pie was so yummy it was okay that the cookies were missing.

All of us here at EU just want to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope your kitchen is full of wonderful smells right about now. Mine smells of a made from scratch Apple Pie that I just pulled from the oven.

Rather than a turkey we have opted for a HoneyBaked Ham. That has left the oven free for me to do all sorts of baking today. Next on the agenda is cornbread. I have yet to decide if I am going to make sweet corn muffins or basic corn bread. I'll have to get that figured out shortly. Also, I am going to try to squeeze in a batch of my grandma's Pumpkin Cookies.

Happy Baking!

I have been making bread at home for about 3 weeks now. There is not a favorite recipe yet, but I have tried several different kinds of basic breads. Needless to say we have not bought any bread from the store in over a month.

For the last year when I have buying bread from Sunflower Market. No other commercially available bread compares. This bread is made in a small baker and they use only a few ingredients, none of which are preservatives or corn syrup (you wouldn't believe how many 100% whole wheat breads have corn syrup in the list of ingredients). In fact before my homemade bread extravaganza I refused to buy any bread that wasn't Sunflower Market bread.

Yesterday I was out of homemade bread and happened to be at Sam's Club for a few items. LittleRoq, BabyGirl and I stood at the massive rows of "factory made" commercially available bread at Sam's Club. I looked at it all and thought, "Ugg, I can't eat this nasty stuff. It is going to be all light weight and full of additives. Let me see what the boy thinks." So I ask LittleRoq "Would you like to get bread from here or should I make bread at home?" He gives me an extremely firm "Make the bread at home."

So there we have it. No nasty factory bread in our house. I have to keep homemade bread in the house from now on. No substitute will do. (Well except in a crunch and then I would definitely still be all over Sunflower Market bread, but no other.)

When Savory and I go on cooking binges, we tend not to mention that we each have a raging and private yen for the sheer art of complexity. Our reptilian epicurean mindsets require, as it were, a tremendous number of ingredients, sensitive temperature and timing, or at least a bit of showmanship before we consider ourselves as having truly lived up to the task of cooking something.

While I'm certain that if ever there were a recipe which required us to write a Unix shell script in time with our food, we'd be shuddering in (separate) orgasmic delight, there is something to be said for the simple. In fact, sometimes the simple is the most wonderful thing one can have.

Case and point: oven-roasted corn on the cob. I grew up in a family with both Southern American and German roots, and corn on the cob was something one boiled, slathered in butter, then consumed with those little pokey ceramic things suspending it like some sort of corn spit before our mouths. And of course, the butter ended up all over everything- kind of like inviting the Tasmanian Devil to an all-you-can-eat crab restaurant.

If you've got a gas broiler, you can come darn close to barbecue-level corn on the cob by:

1. Strip the corn on the cob of silk and husk.
2. Put half a stick of butter in the bottom of a pyrex baking dish, and set your broiler on high over it.
3. When the butter is melted, put in your corn on the cob (4 cobs).
4. Check every few minutes. When the top of the corn is dotted with roasted kernels in punch-card fashion, rotate your corn, grind on a little pepper, and sprinkle on a little salt.

Once the whole thing is pretty much roasted, you'll have the most amazing corn ever produced from an oven. In four ingredients.

Of course, now I need other methods to deplete my spice rack. Lest it grow, gain sentience, and claim sovereignty over my newly annexed kitchen. Gotta go.

Happy Thanksgiving and related holy days from Edible Unknown! My particular Thanksgiving opened my eyes to the wonders of allspice, a Carribean ingredient named by the English, who thought that it included the flavors of cloves, nutmeg, pepper, and cinnamon, among others.

You see, I was making dinner, and in lieu of turkey (which I bloody well hate, no matter what Ben Franklin thought) we had this honey-cured ham. Not being in my normal kitchen, I searched around the spice cabinet, which had unfortunately been through a bit of a downsizing (as no-longer fresh spices were removed). So I did what any good person faced with a ham might do- I took a slice, started dumping spices on my hand, and took several taste tests until I came up with a combination I could do well with.

This was a bit of a shotgun Thanksgiving in the sense that the shopping had already been done, and I had not enough time to make anything representing a marinade. After using foil paper, a well-sized crockery, and some water to build a punk-rock dutch oven for the ham, I patted every inch I could with a mixture of allspice, garlic powder, salt, and pepper, then combined more of this in some melted butter (for drenching it halfway through the cooking process).

Another hurdle to overcome was the organic sweet potatoes, which turned out not to be the ordinary orange tubers we are all used to, but instead a starchy, thin, white-flesh job. Starchy as they were, I didn't think straight baking would be enough, so I dismantled some potatoes and put them into a casserole with some water, baked until soft, mashed, then mixed with orange juice, cloves, black pepper, butter, and brown sugar. When the ham was out and the oven set to broil (to roast some corn on the cob), I sprinkled brown sugar across the top of the casserole and let it caramelize.

It wasn't particularly bad, but as often happens with experimental dishes, it was much better once the flavors had time to set. Or so I heard, the next day.

Here's to holiday adventure! See you later, when I'll be discussing how best to cook relatives who overstay their welcome.

Believe it or not, we at EU have a life similar to that of normal people. We learn, we laugh, we love, and we have thanksgiving dinner. As such, I have duly been appointed by the gods of thanksgiving cookery (hereafter known as injuns) to make sweet potatoes. I know what you bastards are all thinking, you're all thinking about how Teleolurian would look in a mini skirt. I mean, you're all thinking that potatoes are easy, you just boil, mash and marshmellow. Alas, this is the lazy american way of cooking. We practice the Zao Zo Zi Ha Ping Wong or the study of the eternal sunshine of the majestic yam.

First, young potatowan, we must select the right potatoes. The right potato has bright orange flesh with reddish skin. If you're not sure what color the flesh is by the look of the potato, go ahead and take a bite. No one will notice. I promise. If it is indeed orange. Congratulations! Place sweet potatoes into a vegetable bag (about 2 pounds worth). Some grocery stores have scales as to weigh the potatoes. The way these work is you sit on top of one, wait for a grocer to come around and scorn you, slap grocer with bag of potatoes and gauge his injuries. If he's still yelling at you (but slightly pissed off) then you do not in fact have enough potatoes. If he is unconscious, then you most likely have around 2 pounds. If he is dead, you probably want to take a few of the potatoes out, as you have too much. Also, you may want to stuff his lifeless corpse in the corn bin, otherwise by the time you get out of prison your potatoes will have gone bad and thanksgiving will have long been deemed an ancient tradition saluting the once proud indian tribes of North America. The next couple of things you'll need are Heavy whipping cream, bourbon, light brown sugar, sweet sassy molassy, and salt. For the whipping cream, you can visit your local farm and smack around a cow that weighs more than 500 pounds. Then milk. Also, you may want to pasteurize the milk. I'm not quite sure how to do that, but I'm sure it has something to do with Louis Pasteur III and some fairies. Everyone knows that you get Bourbon out of your loco hobos pocket, or your Uncle Henrys hand after he's long since passed out watching badminton. Or maybe it was football. Light brown sugar, well, I can't stop laughing about the whereabouts I was going to put here, so lets just say, you get it at the store. Sweet sassin molassin is a product of the sasquatch and is typically found around or near their dens. If you can't find a sasquatch den, you'll most likely have to omit this ingredient. (Edit: I've just learned you can buy this at the store too, ambiguously named "Molasses"). Oh, don't forget the salt. Since you're probably a homosapien you produce this wonderful seasoning.

To recap, the base ingredients for this dish are: * 1 3/4 to 2 pounds of sweet potatoes * 1/2 cup heavy cream * 1/4 cup bourbon whiskey * 3 tablespoons light brown sugar * 2 tablespoons molasses * 1/8 teaspoon salt

Now for the oh so wonderous topping of magical tastiness +2.

• 1/2 cup all purpose flour
• 1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground white pepper (you can use black, white is just prettier)
• one pinch dried thyme (not a handful. a PINCH)
• 1/2 cup chopped pecans (not to be confused with peacocks)
• 5 tablespoons butter, chilled and cut into eency weency cubes.

Now for the actual cookery/sorcery.

1. Preheat your oven/kiln/heating box/toaster oven to 350 degrees.
2. Place potatoes on a foil lined bakery sheet. (cookie sheet will do)
3. Bake until tender, and starting to ooze a syrup, also unicorns. This will take around an hour and 15 minutes, unless you live in Zimbabwe, in which case it will take 75 minutes. If you have mammoth potatoes (the ones that took over the earth there for a brief moment in 1992), then it may take a tad longer.
4. Remove from the oven and let sit until you can touch them without burning a whole in your pasty man flesh.
5. Cut a slit down each potato (not your wrist) and scoop the flesh into a large bowl. Be sure to cackle with glee otherwise the recipe will not come out right.
6. Add the cream, bourbon, brown sugar, molasses and salt, and use one of them new fangled mixing machines to beat the mixture until its as smooth as gator slaw in the springtime.
7. Pour into little casserole dish. Cover with foil so it doesnt go cold.

For the topping: 1. Mix all of the ingredients together thoroughly (except the butter!) in a small bowl. 2. Add the butter and work with your hands until a crumbly mass forms and calls you names. 3. spread evenly atop the potatoes, and bake until the top is nice and brown.

Serve! and hopefully people wont die!

(Note: nothing in here could kill anyone, except the sasquatch)

(Note #2: he wont hurt you because hes spending thanksgiving at my house)

(Note #3: I havent actually made this recipe. I just pulled it out of the nether regions of my brain because it sounds tastastic. I'll update with commentary on flavor later (subnote #1: After I stuff my gullet with turkey))

You know what I'm talking about. Big Easy, someone with no idea what that phrase means may have mistakenly referred to it once. I'm talking about the poor man's mirepoix, replacing onions and celery with more geometrically-correct peas and corn.

You can get this stuff after a mere thirty minutes of panhandling, pickpocketing, or rolling drunks in an alley. [Note: I mean with money, from the store. Don't take a drunk man's last bag of mixed vegetables.]

The key behind mixed vegetables, besides conserving valuable hobo calories by avoiding the cutting board, is that you can use them for anything. After all, plain old mixed vegetables have the bland and somehow demeaning taste of grade-school cafeteria hot dogs. That taste that makes you think of crying and stripping for your uncle as soon as your fishing boat is out of sight of the rest of your family.

After cooking the vegetables to the desired tenderness, I mix in a healthy amount of butter/margarine (to tell the truth, I never measure). This is to pump my body full of wholesome and nourishing polyunsaturated fats and lecithin. Some black pepper, salt, and perhaps a spice duo (I'm weird; I like cayenne and a tiny bit of cinnamon) and I have instantaneous nourishment for the modern tramp, even if I pass out from hunger before I can actually get any of it in my mouth.

Sometimes I pretend I'm a Rockefeller and use my uncashable paychecks as napkins.