Corn Cakes Recipe - An Easy and Tasty Appetizer Recipe

Corn Cakes Recipe - An Easy and Tasty Appetizer Recipe

We made these for dinner, topped with sourcream and fresh salsa, took them downtown, and ate them at the tables at work while the sun slid behind the buildings and the light was fresh and just a little yellowed (not anywhere near how burned-golden it'll be when it hits summer), and the birds were coming home to roost. It was lovely. I'm so going to miss the spring when it's good and done-- and it's already feeling like summer in places that have milder summers.

The best part? It cost less than 10$ and was entirely vegetarian (though nowhere near vegan), and we didn't even mind that we were too lazy to cook chicken for it. It's definitely going into the Make This Again File and in the Good basic Recipe To Know File.

ETA: Here's the recipe, and some pictures:

"Makes 10-15 (depending on the size).
Ingredients
1 cup fresh Corn kernels
2 cups yellow cornmeal
1/2 cup plain flour
1 Tbsp Baking powder
Salt to taste
1-1/2 cups water
1 bunch Spring onions (greens only, chopped)
Pepper to taste
Oil to shallow fry
4 Tbsp melted Butter
Method
Combine the cornmeal, flour, baking powder and salt, in a large bowl. Slowly, add the water until the mixture is the consistency of a thick cake batter.
Stir in the corn, spring onions and black pepper.
In a large frying pan/skillet, heat 2 tablespoons of the oil on medium-high heat. Add 2 tbsp full of batter into the skillet to make a 2-inch cake. Make the cakes in batches of 4-5 or less, without over crowding the pan. Cook for 3 to 5 minutes or until golden on the bottom. Turn and cook the other side 3 to 5 minutes more. Remove from the heat and brush with melted butter.
Refill the oil as needed.
Recipe contributed by Amy from Los Angeles (U.S). "

news: planet green wants to make sure we get all our vitamin d

And it offers this delicious-sounding smoothie recipe:

Stress Reducing Peanut Butter Banana Smoothie
2 organic bananas
1 tbsp organic creamy peanut butter
1 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tbsp local raw honey
6 oz organic vanilla soy milk
4 cubes ice

Blend until smooth and combined. Enjoy.

Home Made Hummus and Winter Tabouleh on Home Made Pita

Yeah, I totally made pita. That's what happens when I want a specific bread and we don't have any, but we do have flour. And lemme tell you, they were the best pitas I've ever had.

Start with tap-hot water and two-thirds of a cup of steel-cup oats. This is for the Winter Tabouleh, not the pita, so if you're not making that, skip. (note: normally, this is bulgar wheat, but I didn't have any, and oats are wintery. Be sure they're 'steel cut'-- rolled oats will only get squishy.)

Make the pitas thusly:

Mix two teaspoons of yeast with a third cup of warm water and let it sit whil you prep the rest. I added a blob of brownsugar to give the yeast something to eat.

Sift three cups of flour into a big ol' bowl with a teaspoon and a half of salt. 

Add a tablespoon of honey / sugar / sweet stuff and two tablespoons of olive oil / veggie oil / melted butter. I used honey and oilve oil because I figured they'd be more historically accurate. mix in the yummy yeast-water; it should look like soy milk if the yeast has woken up-- thick and offwhite and creamy, a little frothy. Add up to another cup of water while you keep stirring-- add it in spashes, and stop when the flour is all wet and it forms a big sticky ball in the bowl. I used a rice paddle because I'm convinced they work for everything that needs hand-stirring, but, like, a wooden spoon or the like would work too. I guess a standup mixer would work; I don't have one, so I don't know, but I do know that some of them come with bread attatchments. I think they're cheating, because bread isn't that hard to make. 

Flour the counter and dump the breadball onto it. Knead it for ten minutes or so by folding the far edge toward you and squishing it in with a rolling-way-from-you sort of motion. Like making big circles: pull the edge toward you and then squoosh all the middle parts away from you. Then turn it and do it again. And again and again and again, adding more flour whenit even looks like it might get sticky-- but just a dusting. Too much makes it crap. When it feels firm and even, roll it all back into a ball and oil the scraped-out mixing bowl. There shouldn't be much to scrape if it's mixed well before hand. Drop the breadball back in, and flip it or spray it so the top is oiled, too... just not, like drenched. You want it like tanning spray, so it doesn't dry out while it's rising. Cover it with a clean towel, sprinkle some water over the top, and let it sit for one and a half to two hours.

While that' sitting, make all your yummies.

Hummus is easy: a drained can of chickpeas, a bunch of garlic, some lemon juice (a few tablespoons; i like mine lemony), salt and pepper, either some tahini, some sesame seeds, or a very very very small amount of sesame oil. Very small. Like, eighth of a teaspoon or less, or that's all you taste. Blenderize or super-mash it while adding a little olive oil at a time until it looks like hummus and has a spreadable consistency. Chickpeas can take alot of oil, so this isn't really all that difficult.

The Winter Tabouleh is easy, too, but takes more time. Take your soaked oats-- they should be eatably soft but not mushy-- and drain them as best as you can without squahing them into goo. Finely mince a cup and a half of carrot tops (organic and clean so you can eat them, of course. they taste like strong parsley, which is the more usual Tablouleh ingredient, and are a little tougher, so just be sure to mince them really small), and toss it in. Chop some tomatoes-- I used about a handful of grape tomatoes, chopped in half and then in quarters. A little salt and pepper, some olive oil and lemonjuice, a lovely good mix, and there you are.

Preheat the oven to 450ish. 400 if you have a hot oven; I don't. put a cookie sheet upside down on the middle rack if you don't have a pizza stone (most of us dont).

Now, back to the pitas. Once they've risen for two hoursish, re-flour the counter and dump the bred on it. Squish it down a little-- just a little. Working it will squish it more, and you want some of the yeasty gases to stay in. I just patted it like I was making a snowman or something. Chop it into eight sections (i used a metal flipper because I don't have a decently sharp knife or a board scraper), and ball them into little rounds. Let them sit for 20 minutes under the dampish towel. When they've rested, flatten them down a little and then pretand you're making little pizzas-- pick them up and stretch them and pull them into little rounds about 6 or 7 inches across and less then a half inch thick. When the oven is hot, toss them directly onto the hot cookie sheet and keep the oven closed for three minutes. You can take them out now, if you like really soft pitas, but I like mine slightly toastier, so I flipped them and waited another minute and a half, then pulled them. Wrap them up in a towl to keep them warm and tender while the others cook-- I could cook three at a time, so it took three goes with one batch of only two. In ten minutes, you've got pitas!

The way they puff up, they make their own little pockets. When they're cool enough to handle, stuff them with the hummus and tabouleh and nom nom nom to your heart's content!

Rice And Protein And Chese

I've been sick all this week, and on top of that, it's my first full week back at work, and I'm kinda busted, so when I got hungry the other night, I made an old stand-by meal: Rice + Protein + Cheese. It really should have a better name then that, but it's so mutable that it'd sound like a dozen different meals. So this one is made with basmati rice cooked in veggie broth for extra flavor and nutrients (and because I sort of wanted soup, but not really), topped with a Black Bean Veggie Burger from Morning Star Farms that I crisped up in the toaster oven and then chopped into bike-sized pieces, then with sharp cheddar cheese and mild salsa. On the side is steamed veggies-- broccoli, mostly, and greenbeans, corn and peas, cooked with some random seasonings and adobo and topped with more chese.

Ta da! A perfect meal for one: about 2/3 cup of rice, one burger, maybe an ounce of cheese and 2/3 cup veggies. And basically healthy. When made with water, it's only about 450 calories-- we ate alot of variations of this when H and I were on a diet two years ago. And the fact that any rice, any protein and any cheese can be combined makes it almost as versatile as pasta.

Yum!

Super-Veg Gratin

No pictures again, because it didn't last that long. I take it as a compliment, and as a need to take pictures before I tell people it's ready.

Anyway, here's what I did:

Butter a 13 x 9 in baking dish. Use a piece of bread and tear the buttered remains up to make breadcrumbs; mix it with five crumbled saltines.

Slice up four potatoes very thin-- if you have a mandolin or one of those box graters that can do narrow slices, definitely do that; I only have a moderately sharp knife, and that takes forever and left me with a blister where the edge of the handle hits my first finger. Keep the slices in water until you're ready so they won't go gross.

Slice up carrots the same way. I used one of those monster carrots, and it equaled about two or three good sized normal carrots.

Finely chop 1 red pepper, 1 stalk of celery and it's leaves, 1 onion, and 4 cloves of garlic.

Grate 1/3 of a block of sharp cheddar and mix it with an equal amount of parmesan-- shaky-cheese is fine.

Open a carton of potato-leek soup and one of veggie broth.

Heat the oven to 450 or 475 (mine runs cold, so I did 475).

Get layering! Like so:
- Layer of potatoes topped with salt and pepper
- Layer of carrots
- Layer of mixed veg and garlic
- Layer of cheese, topped with salt, pepper, thyme, rosemary
- Repeat. Mine repeated another whole time, and then a third layer of potatoes to cover the top.
- Mix half the broth with all the potato-leek soup and pour it over the layered veg.
- Top with the bread and more salt, pepper, thyme and rosemary. Butter if you want.

Cover with foil and cook on a cookie sheet to catch drippings for 45 to 50 minutes. Remove the foil and cook until the veggies are all uniformly soft. Let it sit for ten minutes until it stops boiling and sets up a little, then dig in! Even when lava-hot, it's really yummy and has a texture something like the inside of a pot pie.

Lasagna-esque Pasta Bake

The camera's entirely kaput now, so there's no pictures, but here's what I made for dinner last night:

Layered in a 9x13" pan:
- Half-boiled, broken-up lasagna noodles, about half a box. We've had these forever, and we didn't have the supplies to make real lasagna, so I made the noodles about as big as, say, bowtie pasta, and pre-boiled them until they were a little short of al dente.
- One can of drained cannelini beans. Protein that doesn't require any extra effort; we're running low on chicken, totally out of turkey and sausage, and we haven't had beef in the house for months, plus, I'm sick and I didn't feel like messing with cooking and shredding chicken.
- One onion, chopped, and two cloves of garlic, minced. Onions are cheap and healthy, as are garlic.
- Button mushrooms, sliced. I used fresh ones because that's what we had (it was about five or six, cut thin), but if you drained them, you could use canned ones.
- One can chopped tomatoes with garlic, basil and oregano. Two for one last week at Publix! I drained them a little bit so it wouldn't get too wet, but left some of the juice so it would make something of a saucyness.
- About a cup and a half of leftover italian-roasted veggies-- squash, zuccini, and baby carrots with basil, oregano, and butter. These were leftovers from a wedding I didn't go to, so I don't know if there was anything else in there, but I just tossed them all on top and scraped out the butter-residue to flavor up the bake.
- Herbs. I'm a big fan of herbs. In this case, it was dried parsley, oregano, thyme, rosemary, garlic and pepper. Fresh basil from the last few stalks in the garden.
- Cheese, about half a bag of shredded four-cheese blend. Parmesan would have been more theme-ish, but we didn't even have shaky-cheese for that, and the cheddar-et-al did just fine.

Cover in foil and cook at 375 on the top rack for, say, 20 to 30 minutes, then take off the foil and let it cook until the cheese gets sort of toasty, but not overcooked.

Served all five of us with enough left over that the boys had it cold for breakfast today, and we all had mini-servings of seconds last night. So, yeah, alot of food.