Snow, Beans & Cornbread

This has been a stay at home week, we had snow, lots of it for us, at least a foot deep... a lot of is has melted off, but now I can't get off of my road, I tried to go out yesterday, but I never made it past the first hill, I got a quarter of the way up and came to a stop, oh my wheels were turning, but I wasn't going anywhere. It wasn't because of the snow either, most of it has melted off, but the roads are now mushy clay, even those with 4 wheel drive are getting stuck here and there.

So today I decided it would be a good day for a pot of beans, I meant to start these soaking last night but I went to bed early and it never happened. So today I picked and cleaned the beans, put them in the pressure cooker with plain water, brought them up to pressure then turned them off. When the pressure let off on its own, I opened the pot, poured the beans into a colander and rinsed them, returned the beans to the pot and added 1 can of Campbells French onion soup and a large can of beef stock, I added some oil and hot & mild chili powder, then started the beans cooking again.

So what goes better with beans than cornbread? I quickly realized I didn't have any cornmeal, I don't often use it and only buy it when I have a purpose for it, I began looking around for something, anything I could use to substitute for cornmeal, I have masa, but I didn't think that would work very well, I even eyeballed a bag of corn chips... then I remembered I had a #10 can of freeze dried corn, I have ground up popcorn before to make cornbread and it worked pretty well, I figured the freeze dried corn would work at least as well.

I don't follow a recipe to make cornbread, I just take 1 cup cornmeal, 1 cup flour, some baking powder, some salt, sugar (I like my cornbread sweet), an egg, some oil and enough milk to turn it into a batter, pour it into a greased pan and cook it until it's done.

So I opened the can of freeze dried corn, I measured out a little more than a cup, put it into a heavy duty zipper baggie, I used a rolling pin to crush the corn, freeze dried corn is very easy to crush, it came out to just about a cup of crushed corn, I used it along with the rest of the ingredients and baked it in the oven. I did omit the sugar on this one, I tasted the corn and the batter, it turns out that freeze dried corn is very sweet on its own.

Well, I have to say that the cornbread turned out great! The texture is just a little finer than regular cornbread, other than that, you would never know it started out as freeze dried corn! Oh and the beans turned out pretty good too. :)




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Wretha,

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