[Raion]

White cornbread. It's pretty simple:

2 cups white cornmeal
2 cups buttermilk
2 eggs, room temp
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder

Combine the leavening with the cornmeal thorougly, then whisk eggs and buttermilk together and combine until uniform and wet. Should be like a thick batter. 

Get a cast iron skillet ripping hot, add vegetable oil and butter, and then immediately add batter and smooth it out, and throw it into a 425F oven for at least 20 mins. Turn it every 5 mins to ensure even browning. Once beginning to brown, check every 2 mins with a toothpick in the center or a chopstick. Once it comes out clean, remove from the oven, and then run a knife around the edges to release the cornbread, and evacuate onto a wire rack to cool.

For accompaniment, honey butter is delicious:

1 Stick of soft butter
1/4-1/3 cup of honey

Cream them together and then spread a bit on a slice of cornbread. 

Cornbread has no sugar. If it has sugar or flour, it's corncake.

[Irinikus]

Fresh Butternut Soup with Garlic and Parsley Croutons:

[jpstewart]

Cornbread has no sugar. If it has sugar or flour, it's corncake.

Somehow I missed that factoid hiding at the bottom when you posted.  Thanks for pointing that out.  I never knew the difference.  And I love little tidbits of trivia like that.

---

I made a coffee cake the other day.  (So named because it is meant to be served with coffee, not because it is coffee flavoured.)  It's a sour cream-based batter that gets poured into the pan in alternate layers with a mixture of brown sugar, cinnamon, and chopped walnuts before baking.  This is a family-favourite recipe that we've been using for at least three generations.

   

(And I hope you all with forgive me for the Sun T5240 in the background of the photo on a SGI forum.  The machine was on my desk after a RAM upgrade when I took the photo.)

[Raion]

Sun's are cool. Do you have any recommendations for a good coffeecake recipe? I'm not asking for your family to share the secret recipe mind you, just something that's decent.

And yeah. Northern style cornbread is sweet and cakey. And I hate it because I have this very strange thing where if I'm eating lunch or dinner I don't like sweet things on my plate unless it's like a piece of fruit, and I have expectations that certain foods are sweet, and certain foods are not. So yeah. Cornmeal, salt, leavening, buttermilk, butter or lard, oil etc. Don't add flour or sugar. It's supposed to be crumbly and kind of dry.

[Irinikus]

@jpstewart That looks very good!

So does the SUN, for that matter! 😎

[jan-jaap]

A local exotic mushroom farm (?) which normally only supplies to the better restaurants was stuck with a lot of it's products now that all horeca is shut down due to COVID-19. They were giving them away for a small fee to anyone willing to come pick them up, which we did:



There's no way we can eat three kilos of fresh mushrooms before they perish which was all the excuse I needed to fire up the BBQ. Here they are, drying at a steady 65c (I removed the oven paper later to improve drying):



The end result:



Oh, I didn't dry all of them:



Portobello mushroom with herbs, garlic and oil

[Irinikus]

The end result:



Oh, I didn't dry all of them:



Portobello mushroom with herbs, garlic and oil

 
Great result!

You seem to make very good use of your BBQ! (It's a great way to cook!)

[jan-jaap]

Great result!

You seem to make very good use of your BBQ! (It's a great way to cook!)

Yeah, I bought a Big Green Egg a couple of years ago, and we use it at least once a week, year round. Nothing short of icy rain or hail will make me stop. In winter early darkness can make it hard(er) to judge when something is ready, but the only time we don't use it is when we're away on holidays.

You have to think of this thing as a wood burning ceramic oven. If you can make it in an oven, you can make it in the egg. It's not like we're just grilling burgers or chunks of red meat all year round. For example my youngest son loves lasagna. So I made lasagna in the BBQ a week ago:




When COVID-19 hit I worried that I would run out of charcoal in case of a lockdown so the weekend before I bought enough to last me until summer. Others went and hoarded toilet paper. Pffft, amateurs

[Irinikus]

Now I'm very impressed!!! I've been looking at getting one of those!

[sgt_barnes]

Wow, the lasagna looks very good!

The only things I use my gas BBQ oven is making burgers, ribs, and of course sausage and meat.

Speaking of ribs, that makes me think of preparing some of those on one of the next weekends...