I got in pretty late this evening, and I didn't want to go back out to the store. So, thinking about the meager ingredients left in my fridge...Hmmm..Corn meal, celery, 1/2 a carrot, mustard..Flour, eggs, milk, butter, frozen blueberries,....cookies? Nah, too late at night.... Pancakes? DEFINATELY too late at night. I'm not much of a baker (yet), but Cornbread is kind of a hybrid of baking and cooking. And I remember having some corn-meal johnny cakes back in a former life when I was in the Marines and stationed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There was a place there called the "Da Jerk House" (It should have been called "2 jamaicans and a grill"). They used to make these things called "Johnny Cakes". So I looked up some basic ratios of various cornbread concoctions, and it seems to be that a fairly simple 2 cups liquid to 1 cup dry ingredients is pretty common. So I went with it...
Reaching deep into my cabinets, I retrieved a brand new Lodge Deep Sided Cast Iron Skillet. Tossed in some oil, stoked a sapphire-clue propane flame to "medium high", and combined a basic batter of milk, cornmeal, salt and some honey (and frozen blueberries, just to see what would happen).
At first, I was optimistic. The batter hit the pan with the riveting music of hot oil meeting the mash. Sparing you a description of flipping an object with a spatula, suffice it to say that I finished my "cakes", and ended up with....well...a medium-rare batch of corn meal. Well seared on the outside, and "grainy" in the middle.
Normally I would get all butt-hurt over something like this, but since I'm learning, I am really looking forward to finding out what went wrong, and how I can fix it! No pictures of these horrors this time, and no recipe count. But tomorrow is another day, and I think it's time to try my hand at this baking business... =)
still 494 recipes to go.
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