Cast Iron Cornbread

Corn Field | Image credit/link below

I like to imagine that anyone who grew up in the American Midwest has a fondness for corn. My grandparents originally had a dairy farm but by the time I came along, they'd retired and rented out the pasture to a neighbor who grew cow corn (also known as feed corn or field corn) for his herd.

 Holstein Cows | Image credit/link below

Mr. S  planted the outer 6-8 rows with people corn (or sweet corn) and shared the bounty with my grandparents. I can recall several all-family harvesting ventures in the late summer where we would pick a great many bushels' worth and then spend an afternoon parboiling the peeled ears and cutting off the kernels to bag and freeze for the upcoming winter. 

My Dad, a college professor who, over the years, did regular double, triple, and you-name-it duty as a truck driver in a rock quarry, grocery shopper, darkroom photographer, furniture builder, tree planter, Concord grape grower--also made our daily bread. He had the knack - making up multiple loaves each week to feed our family of twelve. He occasionally made cornbread--which he always called Johnny Bread. 

He always made it in 8x8 aluminum cake pans, though. So I grew up thinking that was how it was made--and only as an adult learned that it is more typically made in a cast iron skillet. Recently my friend Musician, a classical violinist by night and executive admin assistant for the IAEA by day, sent me a gleeful letter. After years of not having one, she'd been given a cast iron skillet and was over the moon! Proper cornbread could be had now.

Her glorying over having a cast iron pan for it AT LAST was so fun and exciting and totally inspired me want to see if we still had a cast iron skillet of our own and, if we did, to MAKE SOME. Reader, we do and I did . . . and it was truly scrumptious! I looked up some recipes online that specifically mentioned using a cast iron skillet . . . and then I sort of combined instructions and switched up the ingredients a bit. It came out wonderfully fluffy and, because of the pre-melted butter trick and nutmeg spicing, crust-crunchy-rich and tasty. I like cornbread with butter pats and honey. My Beloved Spousal Unit prefers maple syrup instead. Either way, it was delicious!

Here is a brief photo history of the making followed by my modified recipe.

Recipe (right click to download image):

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Image Credits
 

Field of corn under blue sky. Skitterpocket via Pixabay. 

Holstein Cattle. CallyL via Pixabay 

Cookery images are my own.

Urban Farming - Second Summer - How It Went Down

This is what my porch garden looked like back in June.  Oh I had great hopes for a bountiful harvest.

 

And here's what the porch looked like this past weekend after decommissioning.  The clay pots will be moved down into the basement while the plastic ones, still filled with dirt, will be stacked and covered with tarpaulin.

Some hopes were fulfilled, but - sadly - many were not. We've been having a drought in this area for over a year now.  Last winter was mild with very little snow.  This Spring was relatively dry and the summer saw successive heat waves without much by way of rain in between.

This was as large as the beans ever got - then they faded.  Two thirds of the seeds never sprouted. 

The two pots of basil grew half the height of last years' crop and looked pale and thin all summer. The pepper plants -- on the left in the above and below pics -- looked like something out of a Dr. Seuss story by summer's end, and birthed only 5 scrawny peppers (that tasted bitter).  The rosemary (right below), being heat loving plant, did pretty well though it didn't grow too high.

The only plants that did well were the tomatoes.  I forget what varieties they were -- both "dwarf" brands for porch containers.  They loved the sun and the heat, but were utter water pigs when it came to hydration.  We had tasty, though small, tomatoes from late July until last weekend.

Ann Z., who stopped by to read my urban gardening posts, had some questions about the tomatoes.  I said I'd answer them in this post.  Here's what Ann asked:

"Does the chicken wire work well in both keeping the squirrels at bay and staking the tomato plant? I've been fighting squirrels all summer and am looking for a new way to protect my tomatoes next year. Also, I live in an apartment complex so I want to make the chicken wire look as neat and nice as possible and not be an eyesore for the neighbors. Yours look very cute, do the wires look as unobtrusive in real life, or does the camera make it look not so bad?" 

and 

"Great, also, if you don't mind letting us know how you manage to reach into the cage for pruning or to harvest tomatoes when they're ripe. Thanks!"

First, thanks Ann for your interest! I had midland success with my potting/staking/protection plan.  Here's what I did [Ack! Just noticed the misspellings! It's late as I wrote this post! ;-) ].

Here's what that looked like early in the summer. It looked tidy and not too messy. Initially, I'd made separate covers of chicken wire for the tops and held the wire cases down with wooden stakes. Inside I used traditional tomato cages.  The chicken wire alone was not strong enough to hold the plants up.

Later in the summer, though, the plants got big, and very top heavy.  I had to remove the tops of the wire cylinders to give the plants room to grow.  I saw no evidence of squirrels until the very last 2 weeks. Whereas I noticed frequent diggings in my flower pots along the front wall of the porch.

The tomatoes ripened one at a time.  To harvest the earlier, lower-down fruit meant I had to remove the wooden stakes and raise the chicken wire enough to reach under and clip the individual tomatoes.  By the end of the summer, I wound up having to "crush down" the wiring - both to get at the fruit and to give the plants more growing space.  

And that's when I saw the first evidence that a squirrel had visited.  Interestingly, it didn't take any tomatoes.  But it did dig a small hole and half bury a chestnut podlet from a neighbor's tree!

So Ann, since the tomatoes grew so well I want to try them again next year, but this is what I will do differently:

• Use pots with straight rather than slanting-in sides.  As I noted in the schema above, the tines of the inner cage hit against the walls of the pot higher up in the dirt.  It meant the plants didn't have strong support when they got bigger and needed it. Ditto for the wooden stakes that held the wire frame down - there wasn't enough room for me to implant them firmly into the dirt. I may plant tomatoes in the big blue plastic tubs instead. 

• Squirrels did get into the wire mesh cylinder - but they didn't do anything to the tomato plants!  Still, I might do the same thing I did with the other flower pots that were dug up - which is to lay down a circle-shaped piece of chicken wire or old window screen around the base of the plants as a block.

• Harvesting was a problem.  When I assembled the chicken wire cylinders I wasn't thinking that I might have to take them apart later to get at the fruit. I thought I could just lift them up.  But the plant grew into both the inner tomato cage and the chicken wire framing - so lifting them up didn't work.  I ended up having to disassemble the whole kit-n-caboodle by the end of the summer.  Moral of story: somehow create an easy-open feature - maybe by using twist ties to hold the edges closed instead of using the wire strands created when I cut the chicken wire.

•  As for looking nice for the neighbors . . . well Ann, that may be something you'll have to navigate with them.  Vegetable gardens start out cute and small and then get rangy and sprawling once they start producing.  There's no way to get around that.  Maybe if you use all the same style and/or color of pot, or put pots of flowers in between to "prettify" the layout.  Or invite the neighbors to plant something in one of the pots so they feel invested in the project!

 

Cages and chicken wire -- the latter rolled up to use again next year. (The brick is to keep them from blowing off the porch.  We had some very windy days last week.)

And here's the last look - including the remaining flowering plants: the hardy geraniums, the plant-with-no-name (nice purple fuzzy blooms though!) and  happy, fat mums, compliments of our landlord upstairs!

Urban Farming - 2nd Summer - First Harvest

"Missus Yount"

"Robin Yount, Jr." and "Kon-Biki"

Our porch garden was home to a family of robins this summer.  We don't see much of Papa Yount and just at lunch today, my Beloved Spousal Unit saw Robin Jr. leave the nest. The Missus is still watching out for his/her sibling who is a little smaller in size - probably the 2nd to hatch and a day behind developmentally.

The container garden has been a little less successful due to our run of successive heat waves.  The pepper plants are pretty scrawny with no vegetables yet and the kitchen herbs seem to be struggling with the heat.  The two 'dwarf tomatoes' both now over 3 feet tall, however, are going great guns.  We cut the first 'matoh' this afternoon.  

 

One other gardening adventure: a squirrel has been digging in the flower pots! 

Urban Farming - 2nd Summer - Setting Up

Image source/credit

Last summer's community garden experience wound up being a bit of a science experiment.  Fun, interesting, but bit of a bust in terms of a substantive harvest.  So this year I am going to switch things up a bit.  I'd used our front porch for pretty stuff and some herbs.  This summer, I am going to try container gardening.  

The beginning set

Last weekend I cleared away the winter's stash of firewood and swept away all the old leaves.  Then during the week, when I took breaks from my remote database management job, I started to get the pots up from the basement and began testing out how I wanted to arrange them all.

Our upstairs neighbor/landlord is lending me some blown glass watering bulbs.  Last year we had some pretty hot days and I didn't always get out there to water the poor bairns.  Maybe these will help in case I fall behind again.

Always encouraging is this perennial I dug up from our shared backyard several years ago.  I just wanted something leafy that first summer when we moved in.  This beastie - have no idea what it is -- has been showing up every spring for 3 years now.  Yes, it's a perennial and that's what they do - but I have not treated this plant particularly well.  I thought it had died after Year 1 and just left the pot uncovered and unprotected out on the porch all through the winter. 

Last week I took an afternoon to get the first round of plants in.

 Two varieties of tomatoes, with protective chicken wire 

(we have many cats and squirrels who visit our porch on a regular basis).

 

The kitchen herbs (thyme, sage, 2 kinds of mint, basil & rosemary).
Plus 4 'sweet banana peppers' and 1 green pepper.

All the Pretties!

Porch garden at day's end.

Next week I'll be putting in some seeds: green beans, carrots, and several varieties of leaf lettuce.  As things get all 'bloomy' and stuff, I'll post some updated pics.

Urban Farming: Week 7 Update

Dear Diary,

A couple of weeks of hot sun  have been most encouraging.  I've had to water the garden regularly for the first time this summer (not complaining, just a change in routine after all the rain we had a few weeks ago).  This morning I found the burnt remains of firecrackers and bottle rockets on the paths among the plots, no doubt leftovers from the holiday doings last night. 

Looks like the cauliflower seeds weren't good as nothing but some self-satisfied weeds have come up in those three squares.  The bush beans are looking all proud and flamboyant, but there is nary a bean-to-be-seen!  The sunflowers grow at least 3 inches a day, I swear, a neck and neck race with the zuchinni who are similarly expanding. 

Guess what, Diary dear?  I thought I planted a 3rd kind of beans over at the end with the pole beans . . . but I am pretty sure what's coming up are beets not beans!  I planted those squares at the very end of a toasty couple of hours, which may explain the confusion.

Have harvested only a couple of lettuce leaves so far, and those were just to test for flavor.  They are still pretty tiny.

Till next time, dear Diary.  Happy 4th and all . . .

Previous Garden Posts:
Week 5
Week 3
Week 1