More Fud

I felt pretty crummy yesterday, like a cold or flu might be coming on. Low energy, achy, a bit of a cough, lots of sneezing. So, I didn’t attempt anything more ambitious than a walk to the market for supplies and lots of time in the kitchen.

Another issue of Cooks Ill, another batch of recipes to try.
I started with the black bean soup, which turned out to be an unqualified winner. Although it takes a while from start to finish, most of that is idle time for beans to soften or for soup to simmer, leaving plenty of time to chop veggies and play with other recipes. There were only two downsides I can see: 1) There weren’t nearly enough left overs. 2) I seem to be pneumatically powered today. Charming.

While waiting on soup, I had a bake-off. I followed the cornbread recipe from that same issue of CI. <cough>yankee cornbread</cough>
I wasn’t too fond of this one. Quelle surprise. It had more flour than corn meal, too many fats (an entire stick of butter, plus a dose of butter milk) and the finished product seemed more like cake than what I really wanted.

To compare and contrast, I also made the “southern cornbread” from the Best Recipes book (also from the CI folks), which came out very nice. Excellent crust, strong corn taste, and it popped out of my cast iron pan just beautifully. (Another cooking tool courtesy of Dan!) Speaking of which, is there a company that makes good cast iron these days? Lodge just isn’t cutting it. I want a smooth cooking surface inside that pan. Maybe I should be haunting more estate sales and the like.

I have two other corn bread recipes I want to try, one from Saveur and one from the aforementioned Dan. But I think that’ll wait until the current supply of corn bread has been consumed.