Well, see, that blue corn muffin at Chile Pie i wrote about back on 22 February kept resurfacing in my memory, and then when i was on the way home from shipping the Segway off to Siberia for re-education i stopped at The Dancing Pig on Castro to try their barbecue.
The cole slaw was excellent, the more vinegary kind rather than the mayonnaisy type; but don’t waste your time on their dried out spare ribs, and if you have to, at least tell ’em to keep that cloying, sugar-syrup sauce on the side…like on their side of the counter. That said, i ate all the ribs but it was pure hunger driving me rather than any sort of gourmandism. I’ll go back to give the pulled pork a try, and maybe that stuffed poblano, but the only reason i mention the restaurant now is the cornbread. It was good.
So good that i got to thinking more about my grandmother’s cornbread recipe that i’ve been using for decades and decided that well, since everybody in that generation and the one that followed it is dead now, i guess it might be alright to mess around with the recipe a little bit.
Well, actually, i’ve already tampered with it. The first heresy i’d already confessed to, my conversion from the traditional iron skillet to Pyrex glass pans for the cooking, as described in the recipe above. And i’ll add a fresh, new confession that several years ago i had cut the amount of baking powder in half without telling anybody.
So now, starting with a clean breast, i’ll tell you about experimenting on my friend Jeff last night with a couple of tweaks. First i put back half the baking powder that i’d removed from the recipe, and i just now went into my recipe file and changed the baking powder quantity to 3/4 t. (3,75 ml.), leaving no fingerprints so nobody’ll ever know i was messing around with it in the first place.
No biggie, really, just helps it rise a little better. The real change is that i adjusted the ratio of wheat flour to cornmeal from 1/4 c. flour and 3/4 c. meal to 1/3 c. flour and 2/3 c. meal to make the cornbread a bit lighter without turning it to cake. Oh, and while i was in there i rounded off the tablespoon of sugar to brighten it up a bit without actually making it sweet.
And here’s a brightened up sight on a late winter morning.
