andiesenji

I don't doubt it, Norm. Some people in the south do add a bit of flour and a few people do make the cake-like stuff that is like Marie Callendar's but where I grew up it was made without flour. White flour was reserved for biscuits, dumplings, cakes, flapjacks and etc. My grandfather owned a grist mill and farmers from all around the area brought their corn to be ground. I ate at the homes of neighboring farmers and at church socials &etc., and no one I knew made cornbread with flour or sugar. (My dad's family has been in Kentucky since the late 1700s, before it became a state, emigrating there from North Carolina and Virginia.) I don't think Johnny cake originated in New England (Rhode Island in particular where it is very popular), there is a history of it, then called Journey cake, in South Carolina in 1739 and it is one of the recipes in The Carolina Housewife in 1851. A note about that here. The corn dish that certainly did originate in the New England area was Indian Pudding, sweetened with maple syrup. I think it is interesting to speculate about how foods migrated from colony to colony during our early history. It's also interesting that all over this continent the native peoples raised beans, corn and squash together, the "three sisters" plants and in combination these provide a complete amino acid chain as a fairly good substitute for meat proteins.

Real southern cornbread is just cornmeal, salt, baking soda, eggs and buttermilk. No wheat flour, no sugar. You can add a tablespoon or so of wheat flour but I seldom do. The first photo on my blog page is of the finished product just out of the oven. The last photo at the bottom of the page shows a wedge split and buttered. In certain areas of the south "hot water cornbread" is favored but it is fried, not baked and to my taste is not what I consider real cornbread. Unless it is done exactly right you have corn rocks as an end result.

It's too late to edit my previous post so I should note here that I was referring to what I consider regular "southern pot beans, aka: boiled beans" With other varieties of beans, black beans, various brown and speckled beans, black or yellow eye beans (often called "peas"), flagolets, and etc., I add different meats and vegetables that are essential for those types of ethnic dishes. I have several bean cookbooks, including Heirloom Beans from RG. However I also have the Bean Bible, Magic Beans, Easy Beans and More Easy Beans, Full of Beans and the Complete Bean Cookbook and some that are completely vegetarian. Also some grain and bean cookbooks that work for me. However, there are no so many good bean dish recipes on the web that it really isn't necessary to spend money on a book if $$ are short. Spend your money on good beans, wherever you find them.

I'm just one person and have been known to get through a 12-pound ham all by myself. But then, I do love ham in all it's many guises. I got this recipe for "Potted Ham" way back in the days when Prodigy had just gone nationwide - a friend in San Francisco talked me into joining. I've been preparing it about every couple of years since then - it goes great at potluck parties, I never have to bring any leftovers home. I serve it with pita, other flatbreads or crackers. I make it exactly as the recipe dictates except that I use lots of black pepper to my taste as I like the stuff. Potted Ham Recipe I made the FRANCES MCDOUGALL`S GERMANTOWN RUSK only once, was not impressed, but it's an interesting recipe.

There are thousands of recipes for pot beans, Jaymes. I tend to be a "purist" in that I like my beans cooked plain and the seasoning meats, if any, added at the end. I use either cooked ham hocks or thick, lean bacon cooked in water in a skillet until the water boils away but not allow browning. The Snowcap beans from RG I cook just as I would Great Northerns - the favorite bean when I was growing up and we raised a lot of them, or the large butter beans, which were also a big crop. If I'm not sure of the beans or I know they are a bit older, I do soak them overnight, rinse and cook for 2-3 hours over low heat, no more than a gentle simmer, or until they are sufficiently tender. I add the seasoning meat and cook for 30 minutes or so and only then will I add salt, if needed, then pepper - I like lots of pepper, probably more than other people. Some of the beans should break up and "thicken" the soup with just normal stirring. Rarely do I have to remove some and use an immersion blender or put them in the Vita Mix. My grandpa's cook, from whom I learned, did not need this as a wooden spoon worked just fine. I know some people like to add carrots, celery and onion but I like my beans with coarsely chopped raw onion on the side. I have tried and do not care for the "U.S. Senate Bean Soup" that so many people rave about.

That's such a good idea.

I'd love a recipe for these beans (and cornbread). Sounds like the kind of thing I might enjoy come winter! As you are heading into summer in your part of the world, it will be some time before you get to the kind of weather where a pot of soup beans are so enjoyable. Cornbread you can make any time. I've had discussion with other folks living in Oz an NZ and the problem is getting really good cornmeal that works best for cornbread. A friend who lives in Mt Dandenong buys coarse and fine polenta and mixes them together to get a cornbread similar to mine. (She stayed with me for a week several years ago and loved the cornbread.) Getting the buttermilk was a bit more of a challenge, milk heated to 90° F, mixed half and half with plain yogurt and allowed to stand overnight at room temp was the best solution. Otherwise it is pretty straightforward as long as you know how to convert US cups to Australian measurements but a handy cooking converter works just fine. You do need a 10 inch cast iron skillet or equivalent. The ingredients: 2 cups cornmeal, I recommend stone ground, medium. 2 cups buttermilk, If you don’t have buttermilk use regular milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice 1 teaspoon salt, if you use kosher salt us 1 1/2 teaspoons 2 eggs, large 1 teaspoon baking soda, (do not use baking powder) 2 tablespoons hot fat (I use bacon drippings whenever possible). Method: Preheat the oven to 400° F. Measure the fat into the skillet and place it in the oven. Mix the buttermilk with the cornmeal and salt. – If adding flour, this is the time to add it. Add the eggs and stir to mix, break up any lumps of dried ingredients. It should look like porridge that has just begun to thicken. Add the baking soda and stir to blend into the batter. Remove the skillet from the oven – use care, the skillet and fat are very hot. Pour the hot fat into the batter, stir to blend. Quickly pour the batter into the hot skillet. Place on center rack in the oven. Bake for 25 minutes. Test with a thin-bladed knife inserted into the center. If there is moisture on the blade leave in the oven for an additional 5 – 10 minutes, repeat moisture check every 3 minutes until it comes out clean. Remove skillet from oven, carefully turn out onto cooling rack. Cut into wedges and serve while still warm.

Aren't these sometimes treated with protective coatings/chemicals (marble is actually a rather vulnerable material, and can even burn) that may make them unsuitable for using with food? Not till after they are installed.

It depends on where in the country you are located. Check with the places that sell and install custom counters. There are often mis-measured and cut slabs of granite or other stone that you can bargain for, usually getting it for a fraction of the usual cost. You don't need a super thick slab of marble - check with places that do marble facing on walls in commercial buildings. They often have left over pieces that are sold cheap and it is in larger dimensions than floor tile. Common sizes are 2 x 3 feet and 2 x 4 ft.

The Universities of Kentucky, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota State University and Kansas State University and the Thomas Jefferson Institute in Missouri all keep track of domestic bean production and budgeting by producers and speculators. Several publications, including, "Sustainable Dry Bean Production" is published annually for people in marketing crop "futures" for investors. You have to belong to one of the brokerage groups to get the publications. I used to invest in various crop futures and would get a list of the hundreds of publications available so one could be knowledgeable about it (or if they didn't trust their broker). Crop yields are listed by year and as I recall, some of the bean crops were up to three years old and soybeans were even older. There is no definite way to tell in what year the dried beans sold in packages in a supermarket were harvested. If you soak beans overnight and cook them for three or four hours and they are still like marbles - they are old, old beans. New crop beans should cook without soaking - I didn't soak the Snowcap beans from RG I got last month and they cooked completely done in 2 12 hours.

And although I hate to jump onto the "order more from RG" bandwagon, too, I can't help but put in a wee plug for the "Oregano Indio." I think it quite possibly might be the best, most flavorful herb I've ever encountered. It's certainly in the running. We only discovered it about five months ago, and we've already gone through three jars. Just this past Thanksgiving, I even put a pinch into our traditional Southern-style green beans. Yowza. Oregano Indio Seconding the vote for Oregano Indio! I recently made an anglo version of feijoada with the Ayocote Negro beans and homemade sausage that I had not seasoned heavily. I used the O.Indio and it was perfect.

The huge conglomerate "agribusiness" companies buy dried beans from numerous sources. They are stored in huge hoppers that are similar to- - I'm sure you have seen photos of grain elevators - and transported in bulk-loader trucks to the places where they will be bagged and prepped for sale. Some of these truck carry other produce and not always are perfectly cleaned - it all depends on the individual hauler on how well the facilities are maintained. I have found peanut shells in with beans bought packaged at a market. It doesn't matter to me but for someone with a peanut allergy, even a small amount of residual peanut protein could be a serious problem. I also feel it is important to support small farmers who are maintaining these heirloom varieties so they do not disappear from the marketplace. The date codes are when the item is packaged, not when it was picked. Beans are often held over for a year or more before packaging and there is no way to tell except with some smaller companies who identify their product with "2010 crop" or "2011 crop" so you know what you are getting. In ethnic markets, where there is an extremely high turnover of bulk beans, you can usually find them a much fresher product than the packaged beans. My local Mexican supermarket (Vallarta) sells more of the Peruano bean than pintos (I've asked the produce manager.) Before they were readily available here (some guy had taken out a patent for the name and they couldn't be imported) they sold a lot of pintos and pink beans, both carried in huge bulk bins.

What he said!

I immerse this type of ham in maple syrup and cook it in the oven, fairly low temp, as I describe in my blog here. It's sort of like ham candy.

Some varieties do sell out quickly and there are no more until next year. This is true of other heirloom bean vendors.

After seeing this query early this morning, I phoned someone who raises rheas (the South American bird) and asked about cooking one whole, as I know they have had parties with rhea as the featured meat. (Although I have not attended one.) She said her husband, who is from Patagonia, cooks them in a pit in the ground, same as for a whole pig. The meat gets very dry if it is cooked "open" and don't even think of barbecuing it. Rhea tastes somewhat like young beef, doesn't have a lot of internal fat. It takes overnight to get the pit hot enough and about 8 hours to cook a young adult weighing up to 35 pounds, and shouldn't cook any larger birds whole. You can "poach" the liver which makes a great paté. Cook the other organ meats as you would sheep or beef.

I already know one of my gifts is going to be a gift cert for IGourmet. I've ordered a lot of good cheese from them and given some to friends who thought ordering cheese online would be chancy. I left the labels on the cheeses (without the prices) so they knew the source and have become regular customers. I love smoked fish but can't have ocean fish so I get smoked trout from a friend up in Bishop who is willing to trade for some of the homemade goodies I make. Barter is Beautiful.

I like this SpaghettiWestern. It's like my feeling about beans and chili, quite apart from any competition rules about beans in chili, I prefer beans separately, and not on the side but at another meal. For dinner, we often have that old Southern favorite, beans and cornbread. Sometimes we serve greens alongside, but the beans are the meal, the star. We do put beans into soups, most-notably, RG cannellini beans into Pasta e Fagioli, but for the most part, the only time we serve beans as a side dish is in a bowl of charro beans with Mexican food. We do occasionally make those sweet baked-beans as an accompaniment to fried chicken, or ham, or pork chops, etc., but the bean taste is almost non-existent after they've baked for hours in that sweet tomato sauce, so I don't really consider them in the same category as a bowl of simply-simmered RG beans. They're more like a pile of sweet, flavorful mush. I am also a proponent of the bean soup and cornbread meal which, to those of us who consider ourselves GRITS, is a once-a-week tradition, winter and summer. Here where winters can be darn cold, the beans simmering on the stove on a chilly day perfume the house with an aroma that promises a warm and comforting meal. As I noted in my earlier post, I don't mind paying a bit more for a product that I know will be good and RGs beans are always good and fresh. Today I'm cooking a batch of Rebosero beans that came in my last order from RG. Then I will make cornbread from scratch and when I say from "scratch," I mean it. I recently got some dried white dent corn for grinding.

I don't care for coffee made with a French press myself but I have two friends who travel extensively and take one of these small Frieling SS French presses with them on their travels. I know they have tried many different ones over the past few years and prefer this one, the 28 ounce as that gives them exactly enough for two 12 ounce mugs. They heat the water in a small Adagio Teas 30 ounce electric kettle. As for me, I do have a French press but the coffee has never been a favorite with me. I much prefer coffee made in a Silex-type vacuum pot. I think the vac pots produce a superior brew.

Doesn't $5.50/pound seem a bit excessive? Not really. I've paid more for beans that are from small producers and with limited availability in the US. Spanish Rinons, Zolfini and Coco Nano from Italy.

Pepper loaf is simply mortadella to which cracked and whole black peppercorns have been added. Sometimes it is also made with pepperoncini or banana peppers, not too spicy. The deli in the old Market Basket store on Sherman Way in Reseda, cooked some of their own lunch meats. They sometimes made the pepper loaf with whole garlic cloves in the mix. You could always tell the ones made in the store, they were shaped like a loaf of bread, flat on the bottom and round on the top. It is also something you can make at home in smaller batches. It's not hard if you have a good meat grinder. The deli would slice the meats very thin and ribbon-fold them several layers deep on the sandwich. It was the kind you had to really mash down to get your mouth around.

Here is what one reviewer had to say and I especially like that the central tubes are taller so there is less leakage.

This seems just a bit like reinventing the wheel. I don't really see the point. Reliable dehydrators that are affordable have been available for decades. A "simple" dehydrator can be just a vented box with dividers to hold wire trays and a small room heater with a thermostat. Something like a "barn" heater would work for a large volume box. On the farm we used a couple of brooder heaters in a shed when we had to dry fruit in rainy weather. A hair dryer is not intended to be run for lengthy periods. Neither is a heat gun. The fans in dehydrators turn at lower rpms than in regular room heaters and are designed to run for days without overheating.

I usually don't soak the fruit because I use it soon after preparing it and it is still very moist. Occasionally I will spread the fruit on a tray and spritz it with peach brandy or calvados, neither is as heavy as rum. However, as a few of my friends are Muslim, I carefully mark the few that contain alcohol. I rarely fill the stollen with almond paste, we tend to like it plain, but I will usually do one that is a gift to a friend who does like it. Since I got the Thermomixer and making almond paste or marzipan is so easy, I can do a small batch without much effort.

I like salt-glazed pecans - no sugar. I use a big skillet, have the oven preheated to 275. I generally do a quart of pecan halves. In a large skillet - 12 inches - fill 2/3 full with water and put over high heat, Add kosher salt until it will no longer dissolve - and the water is boiling vigorously. (You will have a supersaturated solution.) Dump the pecans into the boiling, salted water, stir for 30 seconds, turn off the heat and dump the pecans into a colander in the sink. Shake the colander to remove as much water as possible, then spread the pecans on a sheet pan and put into the oven. Set timer for 18 minutes. Remove pan from oven, transfer a few to a saucer so they cool rapidly and test them. If they aren't quite crunchy enough, put them back into the oven for no more than 5 minutes. Remove and allow to cool on the pan then transfer to an airtight container.