Krazy Korn

In addition to pumpkin bread, The Jackson Cookbook has a handwritten recipe for Krazy Korn:

6-8 quarts popped corn

2 sticks butter

2 cups light brown sugar

1/2 cup light karo 

1 tsp salt

Mix last four ingredients. Stir over low heat until butter melts. Bring to boil, stop stirring and boil 5 mins. Remove from heat and add 2 tsp baking soda and 1 tsp vanilla extract. Pour over corn and bak one our at 250 degrees, stirring every 15 min. Pour out on newspaper covered with wax paper. Cool. Put in air-tight container.

Pumpkin Bread

I bought a huge box of community cookbooks a while back and I'm just now getting a chance to go through them. I've started on The Jackson Cookbook, which was a cookbook by the Symphony League of Jackson. My favorite part of these cookbooks is often not the recipes inside but the little snippets, notes, and clippings I find tucked away.

In this cookbook, I found a typed recipe for Pumpkin Bread inserted in the pages.

2/3 cup shortening

2 2/3 cups sugar

4 eggs

1 1-lb can pumpkin or two cups (Also 1 lb. of butter nut or banana squash can be substituted for the pumpkin. If squash is used, cook it in a little water and mash it up.)

2/3 cup water

3 1/3 cup flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

1 1/2 tsp salt

2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp ground cloves

2/3 cup raisin or dates, chopped fine

2/3 cup nut meats, broken

Cream shortening and sugar thoroughly; add eggs, pumpkin and water. Sift together flour, baking powder, soda, salt and spices; add to pumpkin mixture. Stir in nuts and raisins or dates. Pour into two 2-quart loaf pans. An orange may be ground up, peeling and all, and added to the mixture for variety and extra moistness. For best flavor, bake the day before serving.

Participate in the Mississippi Community Cookbook Project!

Help out with USM's Mississippi Community Cookbook Project.  They are looking for cookbooks published by Mississippi churches, youth groups, teacher-parent associations, and other community groups from 1900 to 1970. They are digitizing them and offering them online. To share your recollections about cooking from or contributing to a Mississippi community cookbook, to volunteer to be interviewed, or to donate a cookbook to the collection, please contact the project coordinator Andrew Haley at mscommunitycookbook@gmail.com. 

IBM Chef Watson

The brain that beat Ken Jennings on Jeopardy! can now help you make dinner too. The Watson Web app, formerly in beta, is now available to anyone.

Create unique dishes with Watson and share them with your friends (and me)!

Oprah's Favorite Things: A Little Heat with Your Sweet

Congratulations to D'Evereaux Foods in Natchez. Their all-natural jalapeno jams made Oprah's Favorite Things list. If you want to see if they would make your list, you can buy some online or see what stores in your area offers it online or by calling 601.301.5522. (The company also offers hot sauces.)

Ashleigh Aldridge, 25, runs the company - and it's quite the family affair. So congrats to all of the Aldridges!

My first - and perhaps last - Shrimp Risotto

Spent hours making shrimp stock. Then spent hours stirring in said stock slowly into the arborio rice for Shrimp Risotto (adapted from this recipe).

Son said it reminded him of Spaghetti-O's.

Behold my first - and perhaps last - risotto!

Boiled Peanuts in a Crockpot

It does defy logic. When I posted on Facebook that I was going to try the infamous "boiled peanuts in a crockpot" technique, I had a friend immediately post, "It's not gonna work. You need a rolling boil. Crockpots are great for keeping them warm but not for cooking them."

But guess what? It works! 

It turns out a crockpot on high is about equivalent to a simmering boil, and that's obviously all you need. (This also fixes the tendency of some to literally boil the hell out of the peanuts until they lose all peanut-like consistency...unless that's your thang, of course.)

I modified this recipe because I only had 2 lbs. of peanuts. I recommend only two pounds too. I have the huge crockpot and, with water, two pounds was close to the limit.

The great thing about this discovery? Thursday night football! Wash your peanuts and put them in the crockpot. Put 3/8 cup of salt on top of the peanuts (or more or less, depending on how you like them). Fill the crockpot with water as far up as you feel safe leaving it on high. Put it on high when you go to work and switch it to keep warm when you get home! (This time, I cooked mine on high for seven hours and switched to keep warm overnight because I was too lazy to fool with them before bed.)

Lagniappe: An elderly lady at the grocery story was picking through the peanuts very carefully. Of course, I had to ask - and I'm glad I did. Seems that the ones that I've always thought looked almost dried are the ones that you need to find. The wetter, darker ones (that I always thought were the ones I wanted) are the ones that cook to mush in the end. Honestly, I didn't quite believe her but she seemed like she knew more than me, for sure, so I tried it. She was right! Pick out the ones that look almost dried and use those. I have 2 lbs. now of boiled peanuts and not one pound of peanuts and the other of boiled mush in shells!

How Sweet Potato Biscuits Lose Their Sweetness: A Primer

Do you know how some things require a bit of time and space - and healing, really - to write about them? That's pretty much how I felt about these sweet potato biscuits I made for supper last night.

First off, Chow lists the difficulty level of these biscuits as "Medium." The rate-setter was obviously not comparing the difficulty levels to my usual way of grabbing the bag of Mary B's frozen biscuits and plopping however many I need on to the pan. I understand that. But this recipe I would not even rate medium as to my regular ol' homemade biscuits even.

Sometimes, when you're in the middle of a first attempt at a recipe, you hear voices from your past. Sister Rose in third grade sighing, "You're a smart girl, Shawn, but you need to LOOK before you leap." My fifth grade teacher saying, "If you read the instructions carefully more often, it will make your life easier."

Recipes teach you that knowing the ingredients is not the same as knowing the directions of what you will have to do with those ingredients to actually make it until the end product. It's a mistake I make time and time again - in life and cooking.

Like many plans in my life, halfway through this recipe, I can't even remember why I thought sweet potato biscuits was a good idea. Such a good idea that I planned an entire dinner menu around them. (What's WRONG with regular ol' biscuits, Shawn? You have to bake a sweet potato for an hour here before even getting started.)

I get to the part about flouring and kneading and just can't take it any more. I cry out for help. My poor husband just sees mashed sweet potatoes and bowls of flour and the remnants of my just-before Strawberry Shortcake Ice Cream. "Find me a cup with a three-inch diameter! I had no idea I was going to have to knead and roll these damn biscuits!"

"Did you not read the instructions first?" "We're not gonna talk about that right now. Find me a cup. Pronto."

So I rolled and kneaded these damn sweet potato biscuits and I cut them out and I said to my husband, "These better be the best damn biscuits we have ever put in our mouths. We better be talking about these biscuits a year from now and raving - because we are never, ever having them again."

I then left him to fry the ham and watch the collard greens so I could go for a walk. With a glass of wine. (Gini Dietrich gave me permission and all.)

Twenty minutes later, I came back a bit calmer and we ate supper. They were very good. They were not the best biscuits I ever had.

And I still don't understand why the recipe calls for brushing the tops with whipping cream - cinnamon butter would have been much better. (The frozen butter is genius, though - you should definitely try that with your biscuits. My Grandma Annie always said the secret to a biscuit is the butter melting in the oven - not in your hands or in the kitchen on the pan.)

If you are one who truly believes that life lies at the end of your comfort zone, then these biscuits are for you. If you just want fantastic biscuits without too much work (like me), then I recommend these Pimento Cheese Biscuits instead.

Learn, dear readers. Learn from my mistakes...

Grilled Corn with Basil Butter

We got this recipe from Wine Awesomeness (who got it from www.Food52.com). We made the butter for the original recipe, but have since used it on tilapia, cornbread muffins and risotto. In other words, it's not just for grilled corn (even though it does make the best grilled corn I have ever had!).

Grilled Corn with Basil Butter

8 ears of corn, shucked
Olive oil
Salt
2 sticks unsalted butter at room temperature
1 cup basil, loosely packed
1 tbsp sea salt

Preheat the grill to medium hot.

Roll corn in olive oil and sprinkle with salt. When grill is hot, add corn and close lid. Rotate the corn a few times, until some of the kernels are blistered and the rest are bright and shiny yellow. This shouldn't take longer than 8 minutes. Be careful not to overcook, or the corn will be dry.

Meanwhile, add the butter, basil, and salt to a food processor and let it rip. You many need to scrape down the sides once or twice. When the basil is finely chopped and the butter has a light green tint, it's done.

When the corn comes off the grill, slather it with the basil butter. Sprinkle with a little more salt if desired. Eat immediately.

Jesse Houston's Hot Quail with Black Pepper Ranch

Jesse Houston, formerly of Parlor Market and now at his own Saltine in Fondren, offered a recipe in the February/March Garden & Gun magazine inspired by Prince's Hot Chicken Shack in Nashville (and as a lover of spicy foods I have a sudden hankering for a Nashville road trip)!

"It was a religious experience," he said of the "hurts-so-good spicy fried chicken." His own recipe works just as well with chicken or cornish hens, but he pays tribute to local Mississippi hunters with the quail. 

The buttermilk and pickle juice bath is most intriguing to me. The buttermilk tenderizes the meat and the pickle juice adds tang. The dressing helps take the edge off the heat. He recommends serving it with "cheap white bread at the base and supermarket pickles on the top."

He adds, "There's a flavor profile you can only get from cheap-ass pickles."

p.s. If you do go to Saltine, you must order the Caramel Cake. It will look and taste nothing like you expect, but you will thank me!

The Louisiana Dog

For some reason - I know not why - my husband decided to start making every variation of hot dog in this Wikipedia entry. (OK, OK. We've only gotten through the Chicago Dog and the Kansas City Dog, so far.) Coney Island Dogs tonight, but last night, we created our own Louisiana Dog (because Louisiana and Mississippi don't have a variation listed).

Personally, I consider the Lucky Dog very much the traditional hot dog of Louisiana (or of New Orleans, at the least). I was surprised it wasn't mentioned in the entry. With all deference to that staple, we gave a Louisiana Dog our best shot.

Andouille sausage for the dog. Dark red kidney beans. (Use one can - all of the juice and 1/2 the beans - and mash with potato masher until soupy. Add the remainder of the beans. Add a dash of tarragon vinegar, a pat of butter, and salt to taste, and let simmer until heated through.) Top with grated Cheddar cheese, diced green onion, roasted garlic, and pickled purple cabbage. Bake in oven at 400 for 10 minutes or until cheese melts. Put Tabasco sauce on top before serving.

It was fabulous!

Next up: A Mississippi Dog. Deer Sausage. Mississippi State Cheese. Pickled Okra relish. Comeback Sauce. 

Who knew hot dogs could be so much fun?! ;)

Short Rib Chili Cheese Grits with Turnip Greens

It all started with Melissa Clark's recipe for Short Rib Chili Nachos right before the Super Bowl.  I found out the hard way to never start reading to your husband about mountains of soft, spicy, chile-braised short ribs, rivers of molten cheese, soft mounds of salsa, hillocks of guacamole, and creamy pools of sour cream unless you're willing to spend three hours making nachos... And they were yummy, but I thought the fantastic sauce was a bit wasted on nachos. (I mean, you had me at cheese and chips.)

Said hubby had the thought of adding them over my cheese grits, which I thought was brilliant. We made it tonight (halving the recipe this time) and served it with turnip greens on the side.

Next up, I'm trying her sauce from this recipe over a beef roast in the crockpot. I'll report back afterwards!

Cajun Bloody Mary

Today is National Bloody Mary Day. And since many of you may be seeking the hair of the dog, I found for you (many, many years ago) the PERFECT Cajun Bloody Mary recipe, courtesy of Coastal Living magazine. It makes a pitcher (so you can share with your friends too or save the rest for Sunday brunch).

Cajun Bloody Mary

1 (46-ounce) bottle tomato juice 

1/2 cup fresh lemon juice 

1/4 cup liquid from jar of pickled okra or jalapenos

3 tablespoons Cajun seasoning blend

2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

2 tablespoons prepared horseradish 

1 teaspoon celery seeds

1 1/2 cups vodka

Garnish: Lemon wedges and pickled okra

Stir together ingredients in a large pitcher, and chill. Pour into tall glasses. Garnish, if desired.