Lemony Cornmeal Shortbread

One thing I've learned as a member of Tuesdays with Dorie is to expect the unexpected. Even if I think I know how a recipe will taste, this isn't always the case. Take this week's pick, cornmeal shortbread cookies, picked by Valerie of Une Gamine dans la Cuisine. My last experience with cornmeal in cookies was with these biscotti, which I made when I first joined the group. I was still pretty clueless, I just didn't know it.

The crunchiness of the cornmeal in the biscotti was texturally challenging for me, and this time I wanted to overcome that issue. So I made the dough two days ago and let it rest - and hydrate - in the fridge. I rolled it a little too thin, and baked the cookies a little too long, but they were delicious. The lemon zest lent a lovely floral back note. The cornmeal added a pleasant crunch without being distractingly hard, a real win-win.

If you'd like to make these unusual cookies, Valerie has the recipe (and cookies look the way Dorie intended!) for you here. And you can see what the other TWD bakers thought by checking them out here.

Cheesy Spicy Corny Muffins

Sometimes, you need to trust your instincts in the kitchen. I know that sometimes that results in massive fails, but more often than not, it gives you a great new recipe or helps you avoid disaster.

This week's Tuesdays with Dorie pick was made by Jill of My Next Life. She chose Dorie Greenspan's corniest corn muffin recipe (she'll have Dorie's original recipe for you), but it underwent a transformation in my kitchen. I'm technically from the south (though Miami is its own region) and I don't love sweet cornbread. Strike one. My corn kernels smelled like the freezer. Strike two. And I love cheese...and she lays down a bunt and gets on base!

So I knew I wanted cheddar and I knew I wanted them to have a smoky flavor but not so powerful that it drowned out the corn flavor. Enter my old friend, smoked Spanish paprika. With a couple of tweaks, these little babies were transformed to can't-get-enough savory muffins. They were easy and soooo delicious, so please make them soon.

Cheesy Spicy Corny Muffins
Printer friendly recipe
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup yellow cornmeal, preferably stone-ground
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon smoked Spanish paprika
1 cup buttermilk
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 large egg
1 large egg yolk
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Butter or spray the 12 molds in a regular-size muffin pan or fit the molds with paper muffin cups. Place the muffin pan on a baking sheet.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt and paprika. In a large glass measuring cup or another bowl, whisk the buttermilk, melted butter, egg and yolk together until well blended; stir in the cheese. Pour the liquid ingredients over the dry ingredients and, with the whisk or a rubber spatula, gently but quickly stir to blend. Don’t worry about being thorough – the batter will be lumpy. Divide the batter evenly among the muffin cups.

Bake for 15 to 18 minutes (12 minutes for minis), or until the tops are golden and a thin knife inserted into the center of the muffins comes out clean. Transfer the pan to a rack and cool for 5 minutes before carefully removing each muffin from its mold.

Yields 12 muffins

White Turkey Chili

This is one of those recipes that you look at the list of ingredients and think you know how it's going to taste, but you don't...it's so much better!

And for that I'm very happy because even though I've been remiss in regular posting, Marthe still let me pick the recipe for Craving Ellie in My Belly this week! For inspiration, I turned to the Food Network website, and this recipe was one of Ellie Krieger's 10 most highly rated recipes. When I saw hominy, I almost kept going. But then I read some of the reviews and to say they are overwhelmingly positive is an understatement. People LOVED this recipe. Like me, many had never cooked with hominy. I didn't even know what it was...I thought hominy was a can of solidified grits. Really. After consulting Wikipedia, I still wasn't sure what it was. Wikipedia says:

"Hominy or nixtamal is dried maize kernels which have been treated with an alkali in a process called nixtamalization."


Well, OK.

The recipe calls for a mirepoix of celery, onion and poblano peppers, some spices, ground turkey, white beans, broth and the canned hominy. I opened the can like there was an alien underneath the lid, and regarded the hominy with suspicion before rinsing it and tossing it in the pot. I needn't have worried. The hominy gave the chili a subtle corn flavor.

This was an easy recipe that made tons of chili, and I thought it was delicious. In fact, I wish I still had some to have for lunch today! I hope my fellow CEiMB cooks liked it as much as I did. If you'd like to make it, you can find the recipe in So Easy, below or here. I plan to make it again, but adapt it for my slow cooker.

White Turkey Chili

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 medium onion, diced (about 1 1/2 cups)
2 stalks celery, diced (about 1/2 cup)
3 medium poblano peppers (about 4 ounces each), seeded and white ribs removed, finely diced (about 1 1/2 cups)
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper, more to taste
1 pound ground white meat turkey
2 (15.5-ounce) cans white beans such as cannelini, drained and rinsed
4 cups low-sodium chicken broth
3/4 teaspoon dried oregano
1 (15.5-ounce) can hominy, drained and rinsed
Salt
1/4 cup nonfat plain Greek-style yogurt
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro leaves
Lime wedges

Heat the oil in large pot or Dutch oven over moderate heat. Add the onion, celery, poblanos, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are soft, about 8 minutes. Add the garlic, cumin, coriander and cayenne and cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 30 seconds.

Add the ground turkey and cook, breaking up the meat with a spoon, until the meat is no longer pink about 2 minutes. Add the white beans, broth and oregano. Cook, partially covered, stirring occasionally, for 25 minutes.

Add the hominy and salt and more cayenne pepper, to taste, and continue cooking, partially covered, 10 minutes longer. Ladle into individual bowls and top each serving with 1 tablespoon of yogurt and 1 1/2 teaspoons of cilantro. Garnish with a lime wedge.

Serves 6

My Kitchen, My World - Cooking in the USA!

Sounds easy, doesn't it? Make some food from the USA for this month's challenge. Until I started thinking that the things we think of as American foods hail from other shores. I consulted with some of my Twitter buddies who helped me see that the melting pot that is the USA makes virtually all foods American. But I tried to make a meal from ingredients that would have been here when Native Americans called this their land. Fresh salmon on the grill, a salad of baby lettuce, herbs, asparagus, tomatoes and corn, dressed with lemon and olive oil. OK, maybe olive oil wasn't here yet but it made a great salad. I had planned to make brownies, too, but the month just got away from me.

My Kitchen, My World is a wonderful group where the host picks a country for the month and if you want to participate, you cook from that country's cuisine and put a link to your post on the MKMW site. You can find it here, along with links to everyone who participated this month. It's a lot of fun, discovering foods from cuisines you may not be so familiar with. This month is the exception, but who knows where we'll go next month...

CEiMB - Confetti Chili

I'm enjoying yet another bowl of this wonderful chili as I write this post. This week's Craving Ellie in My Belly was chosen by Lauren of I'll Eat You. Lauren also selected this week's Tuesdays with Dorie pick. What are the odds of that happening?

I love a good chili when the weather turns chilly. I live in California, so my idea of cold is much different than others who live in truly cold climates, but I was happy to see that Lauren had picked a chili. I'm not a fan of beef, unless we're talking burgers, so I used lean ground turkey. The recipe in the book is slightly different from the one on the Food Network website, calling for corn and only two kinds of beans. I didn't have frozen corn, so I used three beans (pinto, kidney and garbanzo). I added some chipotle chili powder for extra kick, and I used diced tomatoes instead of crushed. All of the above worked fine except the last one. I think using crushed tomatoes would give this a chili-er consistency.

We were very happy with this one and I'll definitely make it again. And again. And again. So thanks, Lauren!

If you'd like the recipe, you can find it here.

Barefoot Bloggers - Cheddar Corn Chowder

I won't kid you...I wasn't in to making this week's Barefoot Bloggers pick. In typical Ina fashion, it calls for oil, butter, cream and cheese (and bacon, but I ignored that part). Some of the comments indicated it was thin or a little weak on flavor. I thought and thought about how to elevate the flavor and the texture. In the end, a few simple changes made this a slammin' good dish. I eliminated the bacon, reduced the cheddar a bit, upped the fresh corn, used whole milk instead of half and half, and cooked the flour a little longer to deepen the flavor. Lastly, I added some smoked Spanish paprika, not a huge amount, but enough to add flavor to the background and elevate the corn and other ingredients.

This was so good, I kept wandering by the cooling pot to sneak another bite. The flavors were rounded and balanced, and nothing upstaged the other ingredients. Perfect. If you'd like the recipe, you can find it here.

Many thanks to Jill of My Next Life for hosting this week. I'm sorry I doubted your pick, and I'm so glad I made it.

BBA - Cornbread

I'm baa-aack.

While I was away from the blog, I made this week's recipe from the Slow and Steady Sub-Group of the Bread Baker's Apprentice. This week, we're straying from yeast to cornbread, which is technically a quick bread. Just not when Peter Reinhart is making it. He has us make a soaker of coarse cornmeal and buttermilk. Instead of just letting mine sit overnight, I stuck it in the fridge the next day and kept it a couple of days before making the cornbread.

A central ingredient of this recipe is bacon, which I don't eat. I ran through a variety of variations in my mind (caramelized onions, sun-dried tomatoes, roasted red peppers...) but in the end, time caught up with me and I simply omitted the bacon without substituting another flavor agent.

This was an uneventful preparation. I used a 9x13 pan (well, two of them since I doubled the recipe) and found myself wishing I made it in a cast iron skillet to get the deeply crisp crust I love on cornbread. Although this was good with the addition of fresh corn, I'm southern by birth and I prefer southern cornbread (that is, without the addition of sugar). This recipe is for northern cornbread, even though the sugar is minimal, I think it affects the flavor and interferes with the corn flavor.

Even though I appreciated the simplicity of this recipe, I found myself missing yeast and the contemplative nature of making a yeast bread. So please come back in two weeks, for we'll be making cranberry walnut celebration bread. I'm already starting to have braiding angst...

TWD - Savory Corn and Pepper Muffins

Tuesdays with Dorie is a group of bakers who are baking through Dorie Greenspan's Baking From My Home to Yours. The bakers take turns picking the recipe for the week and we all post on Tuesdays (hence the name).

Rebecca of Ezra Pound Cake (one of my faves!) chose this week's recipe, Savory Corn and Pepper Muffins. I was looking forward to this one, not just because we've been craving a savory break from all of the sweets, but because I love corn muffins. I used a stone ground corn meal, thinking it would make the muffins rustic. Since I was sharing these with visitors who may or may not like spicy food, I omitted the jalapeno. I used a ground Ancho chile powder, and added about a half teaspoon of cumin to round out the flavor. I increased the corn (I used frozen) to about 3/4 cup. I also subbed fat free yogurt for the buttermilk. I popped them in the oven and waited eagerly for them to come out. They baked for about 19 minutes. I tasted one right after I took them out of the oven (ouch!) Hmm...

They were kind of disappointing. The flavor was...muddled. The jalapeno would have helped, and adding cheddar would have helped a lot. The worst part was the stone ground corn meal was gritty and didn't add a great texture. The corn meal was less gritty the following day, but the extra day dried out the corn so that it was almost desiccated. Maybe fresh corn would hold up better.

Check out the other TWD bakers here. They had better results than I did, and they reported that the muffins were fantastic with chili. I would try these again, stick with the recipe, using buttermilk, jalapenos and less corn, plus skipping the cumin. It's possible I made too many changes and it blanded out the flavors.