Small Batch Old-Fashioned Cornbread

Here is one of the recipes from the Small Batch Baking cookbook I reviewed yesterday.  This cornbread is unlike any I've had in the past.  For one thing, it contains no flour.  For another, it has a deep dark molasses flavor that I think will be a big selling point for some and a deal-breaker for others.  I love it, but if you don't like molasses, this may not be the recipe for you.  Or maybe you could substitute honey for the molasses.

The recipe says to bake this recipe in two jumbo muffin pans, but I used two mini loaf pans with good results.  I also ground my own cornmeal from organic popping corn, so the bread had a fairly course texture that paired well with the steak soup I made last week.  A more finely milled cornbread would probably yield a less coarse bread.

I couldn't think of anything I needed the yolk for by itself, so I used the entire egg instead of just the white.  It turned out just fine.


Old-Fashioned Corn Bread
(from Small Batch Baking)

1/3 cup buttermilk
2 teaspoons light or dark molasses
White of 1 large egg
1/2 cup yellow or white cornmeal
1 Tablespoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/8 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons unsalted butter, melted (I used olive oil pan spray instead)

Place a rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 450°F.

Place the buttermilk, molasses, and egg white in a small bowl and whisk to blend.

Place the cornmeal, sugar, cream of tartar, baking soda and salt in a medium-size mixing bowl and whisk to mix well. Add the buttermilk mixture and whisk just until the batter is blended.

Place 1-1/2 teaspoons of the melted butter in each of 2 muffin cups.  Spoon the batter into the prepared muffin cups, dividing it evenly between them.  Fill the empty muffin cups halfway with water to prevent them from scorching.  bake until the corn bread is crusty around the edges and springy to the touch, 9 to 10 minutes.  Remove the muffin pan from the oven and place it on a wire rack to cool for 5 minutes.  Carefully pour the water out of the empty muffin cups.  Turn the muffins out of the cups and serve hot or warm.  (They are best eaten the day they are baked but will keep for up to 1 day in a plastic bag at room temperature.)

Makes 2 large corn breads; serves 2.


I have linked this post to the Hearth and Soul Hop for 2/7 with Premeditated Leftovers.  Click through and check it out!

Book Review: Small Batch Baking

This is one of the small gifts I bought for myself at Christmas time.

We're a family of two adults and one child.  We love our salty snacks and treats, but we have a hard time eating our way through a full-sized cake or pie and we never eat all of a batch of cornbread.   We have better luck with cookies, but sometimes even they go stale before we eat them all.

I've tried freezing baked goods, but they end up forgotten for months, then finally thrown out or composted.

I guess it's a good problem to have, as far as problems go, but we do like a baked treat once in a while and I hate wasting food.  That's why I thought I'd try small batch baking.

This is a nicely designed book.  The recipes are categorized by type and are simple to make in most cases.  Any special pans needed -- such as small pie pans or cake rings -- are described near the front of the book.  The recipes range from simple cornbread muffins and buttermilk biscuits to more elaborate cheesecakes, souffles and pavlovas.  Most recipes make 2 or 3 servings.

The only bad thing I can say about the book is that there are no photographs.  In order to keep myself from going wild with cookbooks, I usually insist they have photos before I buy them.  I made an exception in this case because I knew the book would be so useful to us.

So far, I've tried the recipes for "Old Fashioned Cornbread" (a wonderful flour-less version with molasses that I will post tomorrow), "Chocolate Raspberry Oatmeal Squares" and "Blueberry Upside Down Cake".  All were very good and I'm looking forward to trying more recipes.  With more than 450 pages in the book, there are plenty of them to try.

If you're like us and have a small family, or a small appetite for sweets, this is the book for you.  If you have a larger family or one that loves sweets, this is still the book for you.  After all, who says you can't sample more than one small batch recipe at a time?

Disclaimer:  I was not paid or compensated for this review.  It's just my own opinion of a book I recently purchased for myself.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

First the bad.  Kat has been under the weather since she woke Saturday morning.  She had headache, tummy ache and fever Saturday, then headache without fever yesterday, and tummy ache without fever today.  I think it might be a mild flu bug.  A different school district in the city closed down today because of flu, so I guess it's going around.
 

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Now the good.  Even with a sick kiddo, we managed to have a pretty nice weekend.  We got a lot done around here, but still had time to relax with some movies, a jigsaw puzzle and some reading.

Shane had an unexpected three-day weekend.  His job site was shut down on Friday because they were waiting on materials. He took advantage of the day off by working outside all day.  He tilled the soil in the raised beds and broke ground for some new beds for this year.  He tilled in some horse manure into all of those areas and also added some wood chips to some of the beds to keep the soil loose.

He disassembled part of Kat's play fort, with her permission since she has never really played on it much, and will use the parts to make who knows what.  Right now, a couple of pieces are positioned to make an a-frame lattice, but I don't know if they'll stay that way.

He spent more time outside on Saturday and Sunday, burning yard debris in the chiminea and re-working some of the ornamental beds in the front and on the sides of our house.  Nothing was planted yet, but a lot of areas were readied for both edibles and ornamentals.

As for me, over the weekend I tackled that basket of filing, did my grocery shopping, did my weekly household accounting, and I tried my hand at making 30-minute mozzarella cheese using this recipe.  That was a lot of fun.  I thought it wasn't going to work out, then all of a sudden the texture of the curds changed and there was the mozzarella.  I did learn that it's next to impossible to take photos while making cheese, but here is one of the finished product.

Homemade mozzarella.

I made a couple of very homemade pizzas for supper.   I made scratch crusts, sauce from last year's garden tomatoes, pepperoni I made from some of the venison in our freezer and topped it all with the homemade mozzarella.  I had read a couple of times that the cheese wouldn't melt right, and I can confirm that now.  It really doesn't melt at all, it just gets soft.  But oh well, it tasted good, and that's what really matters. 

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And finally, the ugly.  Here are pictures of our back yard right now.  This time of year, it's ugly, ugly, ugly, and that the weather was gloomy when I took these didn't help.  By June, though, it will be quite pretty.  Our back deck is especially ugly right now.  The rails came off when we thought we'd put a sun room there, and the plastic resin lattice we had as skirting wouldn't hold paint and kept blowing down, so we took it off. 

The plan is to put a new back door in our house (it's waiting in our garage) and then to eventually remove the deck and build a new one.  The door will go in as soon as weather and time allow, but we have no idea when the deck project will happen.  At the very least, we'll put some basic railings back on for safety's sake.

Eager to start planting.  Can hardly wait to get the camper out, too.

Wood chips and manure to be tilled in.

Tilling the raised beds.

Back yard in winter.  Anyone want to buy our old pop-up?

Junk-covered patio, wood pile, clothesline.

Our big, fat, ugly deck must go.  Rain catchment tanks off to the right of it.

So that was my weekend.  I actually enjoyed it this time. We struck a nice balance; I hope we can do that more often in the future.

What did you do this weekend?

Gardening Has Begun

We noticed the tree trimmers were working in our neighborhood yesterday, so Shane stopped and talked to one of the workers on his way home.  The guy just happened to be a crew lead and just the man Shane needed to see.  He arranged to have a load of wood chips delivered bright and early this morning.  They showed up around 7:30.

The load of mulch was free, because it saves the company the money and time they would have spent hauling it back to wherever it is they haul it back to.

We'll be using our mulch in flower beds, tree rings, etc.  The finer stuff might go into some of are veggie beds to help keep the soil loose.

If trimmers are working in your area, stop and ask them for some chips for mulch.  The worst that can happen is that they say no, or charge you a small fee.  Who knows, though?  You might just get it for free.

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Yesterday Shane also picked up a truckload of horse manure.  It has aged enough that it can go straight into our raised beds and flower beds.

His crew is waiting on materials and are at a stand-still on the job site, so he has an unexpected day off.  He's getting ready to till in that manure as I type this.

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We're in Planting Zone 6, but we've had a very mild winter; the ground hasn't even frozen this season.  We're thinking of going ahead and planting peas this weekend or next.  After scouring the Internet, I've found adages such as "peas in by Valentine's Day" and "peas in by President's Day".

In the past, our peas haven't done well.  I think we've been planting them too late.  If we plant them this weekend, we'll be 2 to 3 weeks early, but I think we're going to take the chance.  The seeds are from last year (but still good), so we won't be out anything but our time if they don't grow.

We are also thinking about planting them in succession, some each weekend, so that we'll have "insurance" if the earliest ones fail.

Anyone else, especially Zone 6 readers, planting anything yet?

Kansas City Steak Soup

I know I posted this recipe on my old blog, but it's worth repeating.

This is the favorite soup in our house.  It's supposed to be a cut-down version of the steak soup served at Kansas City's Plaza III Restaurant.  I don't know if it is the actual version, but it's certainly close.

Canned beef consomme really boosts the flavor of this soup, but a quality beef stock (canned or homemade) can be substituted.  If you have ground venison in your freezer, it makes a great stand-in for the lean ground beef.  It's what you see in this picture.

Try it...and I'll bet the next time you'll double the batch.


Kansas City Steak Soup

4 Tablespoons butter
1/4 cup flour
2 - 10 oz. cans beef broth or consomme (I highly recommend the consomme instead of broth)
1/4 cup diced carrots
1/4 cup diced onion
1/4 cup diced celery
1/2 cup chopped canned tomatoes
3/4 teaspoon Kitchen Bouquet browning sauce
1 beef bouillon cube
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
5 ounces frozen mixed vegetables
1/2 pound lean ground beef, browned and drained

Melt, but do not brown, the butter in a large soup pot. Add flour and stir to form a roux. Cook on medium heat without browning for 3 minutes, stirring constantly.

Add consomme to roux and stir until smooth and lightly thickened. Bring to a full boil; add the carrots, onion, celery, tomatoes, bouillon cube and pepper. Allow to regain a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until vegetables are just tender, 20-30 minutes.

Stir in browning sauce to achieve a richer color and flavor.

Stir in frozen vegetables and cooked ground beef. Simmer for 15 minutes more.

Makes about 4 servings.

This post has been shared at the Delicious Dish Tuesday Blog Hop.

Diggin' In

Clutter.

This is a room in our house.  It doesn't have a theme, or a color scheme, and it's often a victim of neglect.  Except for the bathroom, it's the smallest room in our home, yet it does the most work. 

Mess.

It's our home office, computer room, craft storage room, and catch-all space all rolled into one.  Some of our books live here, as do the few movies and music CDs that we own.  We toss thrift donations in here until there are enough to bag up and take to the store; eBay or craigslist items are housed here until someone buys them and they are out the door.  Oh, also...the cats' litter boxes are in here.

Piles o' crap.

It's a little room and hard to keep clean and organized.  Since we got our laptops, it's been even messier because we aren't in there to see or deal with the clutter as much as we used to be.

Every quarter (maybe even twice a quarter), I get fed up with the mess and start diggin' in.  Yesterday was "office cleanin' day" for the first quarter of 2012. 

It's not a perfect room and never will be, but it looks better, doesn't it?

Still need to tackle that big basket of filing in the background.

The eBay/craigslist shelves and things that need to be returned to family and friends. I vow that all of it will be gone, one way or another, by the end of February.

Oh, look!  It's a place for people to sit.

Aah!  So much better.

And five boxes of stuff going to the thrift store.

To Chicken, Or Not To Chicken

Somehow I've got it in my head that we won't really be homesteading, urban or otherwise, until we get some laying hens.  Silly, I know...vegans "do" homesteading without chickens.  Still, it's just a notion of mine.

Looks like this year won't be the year we become "official" homesteaders.  We've talked it over and the time just isn't right for us to take on chickens.  Remember, it's our year to finish projects...not take on new ones. 

Maybe next year will be the year we get our hens.  Until then, I have an "egg lady" that can buy farm-fresh, free-range eggs (and honey) from.

So we won't be chickening this year.  But with luck, we'll be greenhousing, and irrigation-systeming, and maybe even solar-paneling.  Maybe we'll be homesteading after all.