Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘corn’

Sep 2

Salt-Core Corn: Pickle Party

Ah Labor Day: known for the last barbeques of summer and a signal to close out the white section of your wardrobe.  I’m spending my weekend as a homebody and loving three blissful days of getting through chores, getting three days of Bikram yoga in a row and spending some thyme in the kitchen.  Har Har see what I did there?  When my weekends aren’t all about running around having crazy adventures, I embrace my Martha Stewart wannabe persona …only maybe a little nicer and without the pesky insider trading charges.  I really do love and need this kind of time to just be at home , typical cancer if you are into that astrology thing.  I’m not really but it does describe me fairly well.

The trick to Martha Stewarting your life is about planning things out.  It’s actually not that hard to be crafty or kitchen savvy if you know how to time manage.  Personally some of my favorite cooking projects that impress people are entirely passive.  Take for example the recipe I’m sharing with you today: Jalapeño Pickled Corn.  It’s a 4 day project but almost entirely passive.  You use fewer than 5 ingredients, spend 10 minutes at the stove and then the food does the rest of the work.  If

When I told my family and friends that I had done this they were astounded, amazed, addled….  What do you mean you pickled corn?  A fair number of people don’t realize that “Pickles” are not the only thing that can be pickled.  There’s an old riddle that ends “What do you put in a toaster?” and the response quite often is “Toast” which people say without even thinking that you put bread in and get toast out.  Pickling is like that.  Your traditional sandwich “pickle” is actually a cucumber that has been brined for a long, long time.  For whatever reason the word stuck on to cucumbers but it also is a process and you can use it for a variety of fruits and veggies.

I’m hardly a common gal.  I wanted to pickle something for Labor Day but being a Martha Stewart OG I had to find something special.  Something that screamed summer.  Something that I could buy in abundance for dirt cheap.  Ahhhhh end of summer corn.  8 ears for a dollar.  Talk about value!  When it’s that cheap how can you not want to buy 16 ears of the stuff and revel in how just 2 dollars bought you that MOUND of food?  Problem is then you have 16 ears of corn.  Right.  Crap.

Pickling is a process by which a food is preserved in a brine or strong acidic vinegar.  It can incorporate fermentation (sauerkraut for example) or not.  It can preserve foods for a LONG time.  You can do it in a jar or a hole in the ground.  No really.  Traditional Korean Kimchi is made in the mother frakking ground.  Why does this all work and produce food that doesn’t make us sick?  It’s the magic of Lactic Acid Bacteria baby!  Let’s call them “labbies” because that’s cute and stuff.  So labbies are benign microbes which are totally safe for us to eat and do us the boondoggle of out-competing some nasty, sickly bacteria under the right conditions.  Those conditions are high salt, low oxygen environments–aerobic bacteria are usually pretty bad for us humans.

When you cover food in a solution with lots of salt and keep any air from touching the food, you create exactly the right environment for your labbies to flourish.  These industrious microbes consume any available sugars in the food and convert them into additional antimicrobial products like alcohol, CO2 and acids.  While the sugars are consumed (which is why no-sugar added pickles are 0 calories by the way) the rest of the plant material is left unprocessed…including a number of good vitamins and minerals—some of which are made by the labbies.  In the process we get an array of fun flavors and when the salt concentration is in the right ratio, a pleasant puckering of the lips.

There are a number of additives that can be used in pickling to ensure a super crisp product.  If cell walls are not kept rigid enough you wind up with mushy pickled products.  There are a number of enzymes that will cause your food to break down while pickling so you want additives to avoid this.  Softer foods will rely more heavily on these additives…things with impressive science words like “aluminum hydroxide.”  I can’t help but think of my brewing professor when I write this.  He’d walk up to an PoliSci student in his Intro to Brewing course, chuckle, say “Al-you-min-e-um” as the Brits pronounce the word and then cackle while asking the non-science students if words like hydroxide were scary to them.  Good natured ribbing to be sure and even if it wasn’t, how can you be insulted by such a charming accent??  Truth is these are “additives” in that you add them but they are naturally occurring compounds, like a form of lime called “pickling lime” so don’t go getting all paranoid that I’m trying to add something unnatural.  The recipe I have for you today doesn’t require them anyway so don’t get worried.

I said before that you can use salt or vinegar.  Salt is less predictable and takes more time but also produces more flavor than vinegar.  Varying levels of salt determine which type of lactic acid bacteria thrives so you can play with the range of flavor profiles you develop if pickling becomes a serious hobby.  Vinegar works faster…usually when chefs pickle something in a day they are going to be using vinegar.  In order to amp up the flavor the addition of sugars or spices is required.  Well my brine is the LAZY kind and so I relied solely on salt.  The recipe is so easy a caveman could do it and in fact they probably did.  Okay maybe not cavemen but if people 4000 years ago could do this in huts then it can’t be that hard right?

Pickled Corn
From Bon Appetit August 2012 Read more

Aug 14

2 Comments

Think Thin Tuesday: Stirring of an Early Girl

A fantastic meal substitute when you are trying to lose weight is soup.  A good bowl of soup with a side of some high fiber toast can be a great, light dinner though admittedly less desirable in the summer months.  Gazpacho can only be done so many ways after all….  The only thing that might sound more miserable to you my dear reader, than eating a hot soup, is making one in the summer.  I know I’m crazy for doing it but bear with me on this.  I like to wake up early, grab a batch of early girls (a tomato cultivar quite popular in California) and take advantage of the morning chill to enjoy the simple meditation of preparing a pot.  Since 15 whopping servings is usually more than I need, I’ll portion it out in mason jars as pints and then freeze them for a rainy, sickly day.  They also store great as lunches for a few weeks when airtight sealed.  I like to keep a jar at work for days when I want a skinny lunch or just something warm to slurp.  Just be sure if you freeze your mason jars that you use the kind approved for freezers and leave about an inch space at the top for liquids to expand.  I’ve yet to cause one to explode but an ex-boyfriend of mine did and it was NOT fun to clean up.

Summer time, especially the late, hot parts of summer is the best time to get my greedy hands on the bounty that is a ripe, tomato crop.  It works out nicely that I’m a natural early riser, that I find the mornings a fantastic time for reflection and that I find brewing up a bubbling soup to be the most meditative thing I can do in the kitchen.  Sure I love to bake but there is something about slow knife work for the mirepoix, the sounds of sizzling vegetables followed by a rolling boil and the smell of a long, low simmer that follows….  It’s extremely romantic to me; in these moments my kitchen is a time machine that magically whisks me away to the fantasy of old world Europe.   A fantastic way to spend the early morning when no one else has yet risen and the birds are just beginning to chirp.

I’ve always liked the early morning.   As a child I used to stay up to watch the sunrise because I preferred it to a sunset.  Sunsets had the connotation of ending and death whereas a sunrise was sad in its solitude yet carried all the promise of a new day.  I read a lot of poetry when I was younger and probably took things too seriously, but I do still find that to be true about the sunrise.  It’s beauty lies in the promise of the new day, fresh with no mistakes in it (yet).  The only problem with my love of mornings is the bad habit of keeping “gamer hours” which tend to keep me awake until the PM on the clock rolls around to AM leaving very little time to sleep.   Miles to go as Frost would say.  Still, as much as I love the music of the night, it’s the magic of the morning I find the most peaceful and enjoyable.  I’m so happy when I get it.  I wonder sometimes if this is something that I’ll always keep for myself.  I’ve never dated anyone who enjoyed even the thought of it and I wouldn’t want to litter these slow, still hours with small talk about silly things like the weather or film.  I want to imagine though that with the right person you could synchronize in the stillness and the simplicity of it.

The Early Girl cultivar, and yes this is a real tomato and no I didn’t use it deliberately for the sake of this blog entry, is extremely popular in California.  My botany knowledge is less expansive than my microbiology but basically it has to do with their ability to grow in extremely dry conditions.  The tomatoes dig their roots into the group deeper than most in order to seek moisture resulting in an uptake of more nutrients from the soil and an intense flavor.  As a result the Early Girl’s grow well in the drier, hot arid regions of the central and southern parts of the golden state as well as in the coastal Bay Area where summers are actually quite chilly but also dry.  So yeah I guess I have a fair amount in common with them past the name.  My love of both the bay and LA and my fervent attempts to sink roots down into the soil in one of those places….  See what I mean about how introspective and philosophical mornings make me?  Here I go seeking out more personal metaphors for life in food.

The thing about this soup is that with all the flavor from fresh basil, fresh corn, fresh tomatoes and the fiber from the veggies that you puree…you get all the thickness of a cream or roux-tightened soup without any of the milk fats or flour..  At 125 calories in a cup and 250 for a generous 2 cup bowlful with very little fat and sugar, you’ll find that it doesn’t taste like denying yourself.  It’s just a giant bowl of delicious veggies that slims while satisfying.

Tomato, Basil and Corn Soup Read more

Jul 23

1 Comment

Muffin Monday: Pack a Punch – Cornbread

From now on, every girl in the world who might be a Slayer, will be a Slayer.

Every girl who could have the power, will have the power.

Who can stand up, will stand up.

Every one of you, and girls we’ve never known, and generations to come…they will have strength they never dreamed of, and more than that, they will have each other.

Slayers.

Every one of us.

Make your choice.

Are you ready to be strong?

Which leads me into the final day recap of that nerdvana that is San Diego Comic Con:

Day 4.5 – Girl Power

(Wo)manning the grill

My only goals for the final day of SDCC were to get into the panel for the Buffy 20th anniversary lineup and to get Peter S. Beagle to sign a copy of The Last Unicorn.  I accomplished both, still with no Fringe hat damnit, and finished the day happy.  The Peter S. Beagle story surrounding getting to his booth is a great one but deserves its own post and so I will wait to discuss that later.  Anyway Sunday is usually a wrap up day and so the most important moment was probably the last supper that night with my friends before we parted ways.  Everyone met up at “The Strip Club” which is a steak spot with a rather clever business model: they provide the steaks but you grill them yourself.  Talk about making money for doing almost nothing.  I’m not complaining though, it was the best meal I had all weekend and that’s because it was me and my Sith friend Chris manning the grills.  Ending comic con in a star trek uniform, friends and grilling steaks?  I can live with that…except for the part where now my friends are far away again.

But back to the big Con event of my final day: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  People still mock this show without knowing what it was.  I usually want to slap them.  This show is no fang-banger, overly fetishized vampiric paranormal romance that set female rights back under some religious agenda and has destroyed Comic Con.  Yes I’m looking at you Twilight and fans.  Buffy was one of the greatest, most female empowering episodic achievements to ever grace primetime network television.  I still have yet to see anything come close on a major network that touches the level of thoughtful feminism this show had.  I grew up with it and to say that it is important to me is akin to simply describing the universe as big—hence the focus on getting to see the 20 year lineup.  The panel itself was slightly disappointing especially compared to the Firefly reunion, it was a bit empty and would have been nice to see more of the cast assembled but I’m still glad I went.  Nicholas Brendan did the snoopy dance so I call it a win.

This show is still to me the first to really showcase a strong female lead that didn’t need men to succeed.  True she has men helping her but key to the plot was always that it was one girl alone who could save the world—no man.  True there have been female superpower shows in the past like Charlie’s Angels but do you notice that even within the title the women are grammatically possessed by a male leader?  Exactly.  When I talk about the “girl power” aspect of Buffy I always think of the last episode.  The speech from the finale of Buffy always gets to me.  SPOILER ALERT: if you want to watch this show at any time I’m about to basically ruin the conclusion of the arc for the final season for you.  Just be forewarned.

In the finale of BTVS Buffy decides she’s had enough of being the only strong woman in the world just because a bunch of men decided to set it up that way thousands of years ago.  In order to create an army that can fight off the advances of a very imposing ancient vampire army, Buffy gets Willow (a wicca more powerful than all of those men combined) to release Buffy’s power.  The intent:  activate all the women who have the potential for strength and greatness.  I always get chills when I hear the speech.   Buffy did awaken an entire generation of viewers to the idea that they could be strong.  This moment in the show serves a plot point but it was a pretty obvious reference to the significance of the series in popculture: Buffy inspired a new world of modern, strong females through a television set week after week.

From those who’ve never seen BtVS I still hear mockery, even of the title.  After all who names their superhero Buffy?  It’s such a funny name.  They say: wouldn’t it be better if she were “Hunter” or “Joan” or something that sounds a little less country club and a little more masculine.  I always have to explain that was the whole point.  Confront someone with an image that upsets their preset conclusions.  Most people see a blonde, waifish cheerleader with a silly name and discount her as anything more than a moppet.  People don’t want to have to look below the surface; that gets complicated and time consuming and worst it’s confusing.  Confusion makes people scared and angry but it’s important.  We need to take a bite out of something comforting and simple to discover complexity below the surface in order to grow.

In short this show probably irrevocably changed my life, inspired me and certain episodes still bring tears to my eyes.  Keeping with this theme of something both incredibly corny and unassuming that packs a punch below the surface…here are some jalapeño peppered corn muffins.  These are the most flavorful, earth changing corn muffins I have ever had.  I definitely prefer them to the sweeter variety and the moistness!  Oh my gosh.  The corn and additions help the muffin retain moisture during baking.  It’s amazing. 4 days later and they had still not dried out.  Serve this up alongside some steaks and fried swiss chard and you have the sassiest southern meal imaginable.

Savory Corn and Pepper Muffins

From Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking: From My Home to Yours”                         Read more

Nov 7

Muffin Monday: Corny Answers (and muffins)

Welcome back Muffin Mondays!

I hate interviewing.  I think the only people who can genuinely enjoy the process of being dissected while trying to smile and sell yourself as the “number one ninja” for the job are sociopaths.   I mean most of the questions I just answer honestly and hope that my personality/skills are right for the job.  Still there’s always that final question: Why should I hire YOU over everyone else?  That question always makes me feel small and phony.  I always just sit there and think: I haven’t done anything remarkable with my life, I’m not valuable at all.

The truth is that you can’t possibly know you are the best candidate in the pool for the job unless you’ve met and seen the qualifications of all the other candidates. That never happens.  So sure I can say you won’t find a harder worker than me, or someone more dedicated or upbeat or any of the other stock corny lines, but I don’t actually know that to be true.  So saying it just feels like I’m spewing out lies like carbon dioxide.  Meanwhile they will test you and throw questions that often times, I don’t have an answer for or worst of all: the answer is something you are just expected to say.  People make a job out teaching others how to answer those interview questions for goodness sake.  Then even if I do honestly mean what I’m saying, I know that other people are just saying it too and the game isn’t really a matter of if you mean what you say but only if you know what to say.

Today I went on a grueling long interview process which was uniquely challenging because they went far past those typical responses.  It was great because at times I actually had exams and puzzles to sort out.  I love puzzles and I am the QUEEN of scheduling things.  My favorite thing about college was getting fresh course guides each quarter and planning my course schedule with various colored charts.  I know Nerd Alert.  I love organizing things though and solving problems/puzzles gives me this strange little thrill.  In high school my friends called me the “Crack Enhanced Martha Stewart” (No I wasn’t on drugs, just tons of caffeine) and I’ve always said I’d make a kick ass personal assistant.

I am exhausted mentally, mostly from the energy I spend trying to be as calm and confident on the outside as possible, so without further ado here is the recipe for…

Dorie Greenspan’s Corniest Corn Muffins

  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 cup yellow cornmeal, preferably stone-ground
  • 6 tablespoons granulated sugar
  • 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
  • 1 cup buttermilk
  • 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
  • 3 tablespoons corn oil
  • 1 large egg
  • 1 large egg yolk
  • 1 cup corn kernels (add up to 1/3 cup more if you’d like) – fresh, frozen or canned (in which case they should be drained and patted dry)

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Butter or spray the 12 molds in a regular-size muffin pan or fit the molds with paper muffin cups. Alternatively, use a silicone muffin pan, which needs neither greasing nor paper cups. Place the muffin pan on a baking sheet.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt and nutmeg, if you’re using it. In a large glass measuring cup or another bowl, whisk the buttermilk, melted butter, oil, egg and yolk together until well blended. Pour the liquid ingredients over the dry ingredients and, with the whisk or a rubber spatula, gently but quickly stir to blend. Don’t worry about being thorough – the batter will be lumpy, and that’s just the way it should be. Stir in the corn kernels. Divide the batter evenly among the muffin cups.

Bake for 15 to 18 minutes  or until the tops are golden and a thin knife inserted into the center of the muffins comes out clean. Transfer the pan to a rack and cool for 5 minutes before carefully removing each muffin from its mold.

Sep 29

corncookies
1 Comment

Candy Corn Cookies

Everyone knows about the bacon trend.  Bacon has pretty much been popping up everywhere.  Even I’m guilty of doing it, I made maple bacon ice cream but in my defense it is one of the more popular items that comes out of my kitchen.  Putting everyday foods in unusual dishes is the larger trend that the “bacon multiple man” effect has sprouted out of.  Shows like Chopped, where contestants are given gummy bears that they must incorporate into appetizers.  I’d been thinking about how I could use corn, fresh corn, in a dessert.

What few desserts I’ve seen featured panna cotta as a vehicle for this strange application of the ingredient.  It sounds intriguing but since I’ve never made a traditional panna cotta, I decided not to start with an unusual ingredient.  Momofuku restaurants, owned by chef David Chang, have put out a corn cookie.  This was an intriguing idea but when I read the ingredient list I was sad to see they used only corn flour and corn meal to make the cookie.  So I decided to set out for a sugar cookie recipe of my own.
The question was how to use the fresh corn.  Should I put sweet nuggets in the cookie mix like chocolate chips?  Not quite the feel I was going for.  Staring into my fridge I realized I was out of butter…AHA!  Inspiration!  No butter but I did have heavy cream and some milk.  I could make creamed corn the day before, puree it and use the mixture like butter.  Excellent plan! Read more

Sep 17

Creamed Corn Chicken-13

Ear-Responsible Eating

When corn was first introduced to the European diet, and later when it was heavily relied upon by the poor southern states, a massive outbreak of Pellagra occurred.  Pellagra is a B3 (Niacin) vitamin deficiency.  It is characterized by the 4 Ds: dry sky, diarrhea, dementia and death.  Lovely no? Niacin is present in corn but it’s bound to other chemicals making it impossible for the human body to absorb—unless it’s released through alkaline processing called “nixtamalization.”  I know, that’s a really big scary word.  Basically by soaking the corn in a structure that has a high pH, basic, the B3 vitamin gets released in the corn so the human body can absorb it.

The Indians never suffered from Pellagra; they had been soaking their corn in mixture of lime (a calcium hydroxide, not the fruit) and ash mixtures for centuries.  Did they know about the nature of vitamins and bioavailability?  Probably not.   This process developed a lot of flavor, killed off fungal toxins and made it easy to separate the soft, mashable innards of each grain from the hull/skin of the seed.  It’s probable that because these advantages meant tribes would continue to “nixtamalize” their corn, they were able to observe the health benefits over time.

Europeans failed to learn from the local inhabitants of the New World and so they never prepared their corn as the Indians did.  It was cheap to grow and became the staple foodstuff of the lower class diets.  As a result pellagra outbreaks in the 18th and 19th century became common but they were blamed on toxins thought to be present in the corn crops.  It wasn’t until an outbreak in the American Deep South during the early 1900s that killed 1500 people that doctors began to think it could be a problem with corn itself.

Today a variety of foods in the American diet are fortified with vitamins and minerals most people don’t even know they are getting.  Iodized salt, as an example, is salt that contains iodine and were it not for that fortification, a number of people would probably be walking around with goiters today.  Niacin is in almost any wheat product we buy today as well as naturally occurring in meats.  Cheap meats have made it so any omnivore American is able to get their needed dosage…which ironically is only possible because of corn.  I’ll tell you more about THAT in a few days. Read more

Sep 15

Texas Jalepeno Corn Bread Chipotle Mayo

Ready for an a-Maize-ing Week?

I was preparing the post for a recipe for Texas Buttermilk Cornbread and it got me thinking….you don’t get more American than Corn.

No really.  The top three crops grown in the world are wheat, rice and corn; within the United States corn tops the list as the number one crop for harvest.  North America (so this includes Mexico and other Latin countries) harvest 332 metric tons in a year.  The American portion of that number makes up 40% of the total corn in the world and of that number how much do we actually eat as corn?

Only 3%

Corn is the crop we grow in the greatest quantity and yet we only consume, in its natural form, 3% of what gets harvested.  I’ll be delving more into why that is in a future post because there’s enough to talk about with corn, and I have quite few recipes, to make this an “A-Maize-ing Week.”

Corn 101

Domestication of corn began in the mesoamericas 10,000 years ago.  The plant has several names you may have heard: Zea mays, Teosinte, Maize, Indian corn and variations of Corn like Sweet/Dent/Popcorn etc.  I’m going to try to explain all the taxonomy for you now.  Zea is name of a genus of grasses, Zea mays being the variety we know as corn, and teosinte is a name given to many other varieties of Zea we do not consume.  Teosinte looks nothing like the corn we eat but it has played a part in the genetic manipulation of corn over the centuries.  It was only through a great deal of human directed evolution that we have edible corn today.  I’ll get into that more for my GMO post.

“Maiz” was the Spanish form of a word used by the Taino people for corn.  These were the indigenous people that Columbus (Spanish explorer, see, starting to make sense now) interacted with during his (in)famous discovery of America.  The British referred to any cereal crop as corn.  Cereal crops include wheat, rice, barley and so on.  Eventually the term became associated just maize. Terminology’d! Read more

Aug 8

1 Comment

Jose Jalapeno on a stick!

Or in this case, chopped up and in some cornbread. I’m just making a quick Sunday update.  Sundays are just the perfect day to sleep in, wake up to a clean kitchen around 10am and get to baking.  It’s just the time spent cleaning the kitchen afterward that I don’t like.  I think for a Rosie-bot that cleans the kitchen I’d risk a skynet takeover.  What’s the end of humanity compared to never doing dishes again?! Read more

Jul 5

A Corn-ucopia of Flavor

Summertime! Holy crap where did the time go? It’s July already? I graduated COLLEGE? Are you kidding me? Well phooey I can’t believe I got so lax again with the posting though I suppose finals, graduation, family gatherings and my birthday all happening in a 2-3 week period is a good excuse. Well isn’t it?

Anyway I know with summer that fresh corn is coming in at cheap prices and sure to be gracing family grills. I used to be in a home with six people and just as many dogs so left over corn didn’t need to be re-purposed but now that it’s just me I find myself with more than I know what to do with. Eating roast corn on the cob a day later is never as satisfying and unless it gets microwaved, likely to wind up overcooked. The solution: corn salad. This corn salad is something I love to eat in the summer. I wind up making extra corn just to prepare this side for an afternoon snack, plus the dog loves a little corn in his bowl too so that’s another excuse to throw an extra ear on the barbeque. Oh plus the instructions for this recipe consist of three words.

Spicy Corn Salad

This is a basic batch recipe, just double it to make a larger batch.  Or triple it.  You’ll eat it all anyway.

  • 2 roast ears of white corn, kernels removed
  • 1 diced jalepeno
  • Juice and zest of two limes (4 if it’s key limes)
  • Juice and zest of a lemon
  • 1/4 cup Diced Shallots
  • 2 Tbsp Chopped Cilantro
  • 1 diced avocado

Toss ingredients together.

Serve cold.  Serve warm.  Serve in a whole wheat tortilla with extra jalepeno and a little bit of sour cream.  Put it on a burger or top a spicy sausage with it.  You’ll love it no matter what you do.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 946 other followers