Cornbread...From Scratch

We love our vegetable garden.  And our vegetable garden loves us.

Right now, the remnants are clinging on for dear life; sugar snap peas, jalepaños, problano chilis, potatoes, onions and tomatoes are all that's left.

One day this fall, Brandon appeared at the front door with this:

"Mom, I harvested all this corn.  Can we make some bread?"

"Well, um, well.  Those are corn tassels.  You know, the shell that holds the pollen.  I don't know if you can make bread out of them," I replied.

His face turned rather forlorn.  "But, I harvested it all."

"Well.  Ok, I'll check online and see what I can find," I said.

I found very little.  I was able to unearth some recipe used by the Navajos, but it wasn't sounding too appealing.

"Brandon, aren't there some leftover ears of corn out there?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Do you want to pick some, and we can use those instead?" I asked.

"Sure."

So, he picked overripe, dried out ears of corn and painstakingly pulled out the corn, kernel by kernel.  The next thing I knew, he was putting it on a cookie sheet and setting it outside.  "I need to get all the water vapor out," he explained.

"Oh.  I didn't know you knew about that," I said.

In order to speed things up a bit, I tossed the kernels in the blender then stuck them in the oven to remove the remaining moisture.

Then we put them in the blender and whirled away.

Speaking of blenders, did I ever tell you about the blender incident when Allan and I were first married?  

I had many reasons for marrying my dear husband, but his culinary expertise was not one of them.  He was in tough guy mode, as I call it.  Tough guy mode is a very awkward, albeit humorous mode to see him in.

"Honey.  I'm going to make us some mean milkshakes," he said.

"Oh," I said.

"Ohhh, oh, OH!  You just wait.  Yep.  Uh, huh.  This will be a MILKSHAKE," he said.

I watched him as he started dumping in the ingredients, as he turned on the blender and as he began jamming a wooden spoon into the mixture...with the lid off and the blender still going.

Things got real mean in a hurry.

And by mean, I mean mean.

I mean milkshake on the wall.  I mean milkshake on the cabinets.  And I mean milkshake of the ceiling.

Tough Guy Morris was gazing upward in disbelief at the spattering above him, when I gasped,  "The blender.  The blender!"

The blender was smoking.  Goodness.  Tough Guy Morris had done burnt up the motor.

Talk about a mean milkshake.

Anyhow...back to the original story.  I exercised copious amounts of caution as I blended the corn.  I kept my wooden spoon out, and the lid on, while it did its thing.

Somehow, we ended up with almost exactly 1 cup of ground corn.  Divine intervention, I'm sure.

By the way, I didn't have a clue what I was doing.  I just figured we could grind up the corn and use it in lieu of "corn meal".  

And that's what we did.  We baked some corn bread and served it with super.  

How was it?  

Sweet.  Flavorful.  Dense.  Very dense.  Let's just say, I don't think Allan had seconds.

But Brandon was thoroughly convinced it was THE BEST.  

You would probably think it was the best too, if it had taken you that long to make it.