Playing with my food so you don’t have to

To inaugurate the blog, here’s a post I was working on for my LiveJournal. I’ll post it here instead because, frankly, I can.

Let’s say you’re me. I know, you’re not me, but just for a second pretend. You like cornbread. You like it a lot. You could eat it pretty much daily. You’ve even gone so far as to make your own creamed corn and then use that in a batch of corn bread. You really, really like cornbread. But you don’t like all that work. What’s a body to do? Well, you could just add cheese. But if you were me, you’d get even more creative than that. Starting with a simple boxed mix you’d add .33c of thawed frozen corn and a cup of shredded cheddar. You’d also heat the milk called for in the recipe with a sprig of rosemary and let it steep for a couple minutes while the milk cooled. And it would be AWESOME.

I started my project with a box of generic store-brand cornbread mix from Kroger. This calls for one egg and half a cup of milk. AB’s recipe for creamed corn (linked above) calls for a sprig of rosemary to be present in the pot while the corn is cooking, so I decided to try it here. I brought that half cup of milk just to the bubble and then added a sprig of fresh rosemary to steep for a couple minutes. (note: I let the milk cool to near RT so it wouldn’t cook the egg while mixing.) Then I made the bread according to the directions on the packet. At the end of the mixing I added the cheese and corn, then poured the bread into a greased pan and tossed it in the oven.

The results were quite satisfactory. I think the rosemary was a bit forceful, so I trimmed the time (which is reflected above). The bread seemed at bit more cakey than I would like, so I think perhaps next time I’ll let the milk cool completely before I do my mixing. Having to heat the milk and steep the rosemary well in advance of baking does add a layer of complexity but I think it will yield a more pleasing result. Otherwise I’m not sure I’d change anything.

Transition

Well, if you were one of the zero people who was looking at this blog you can stop looking now. This just hasn’t worked out for me. I wish I could say it was because I was super-busy in real life or something, but the honest truth is I just don’t care about doing this. It seemed like a good idea at first, but in practise it’s really pretty boring.

I don’t listen to my music in any particular order. I listen to what I want to hear at any given time. I got through the first couple of ABBA CDs (yes, I like ABBA) and decided that there was no way I was going to be able to listen to eight CDs’ worth of ABBA in a row. It’s too much. I started skipping around in my library. And then I discovered that the longer I put off listening to ABBA the less I wanted to listen to them. And by then a month had passed. So I just let it go. And now it’s been over a month since my last post.

I wish I could stick with this, but I don’t think I can. It’s tedious. I just don’t CARE. I’d rather talk about food. Food is a lot more interesting to me than music. Music is important to me, but there’s very little which MOVES me. Food, on the other hand…there is precious little in this world that makes me happier than cooking for friends. So I’m closing down the music aspect of the blog. I’m going to leave it open and start talking about food.