Corn Cakes with Pepper Jack
14 March 2010 by Jean JohnsonThese puppies get more than passing notice. They go with spicy breakfasts and function as fresh bread come lunch or dinner time. They also work baked up as small fry for starters. Like neighbor, Patrick Earnest, said, “We really enjoyed the other night with everyone. The little pancakes had to be my favorite ….. Yum!”
Corncakes with Pepper Jack
Cooking Beyond Measure, page 44
Recipe Note
To a couple beaten eggs, add a half cup vinegared milk and a spoonful of oil along with a pinch of salt and soda. Stir in enough cornmeal to get a spoonable batter. Bake your corncakes on a medium griddle and sprinkle on grated pepper jack once you flip them. Use a lid to melt the cheese while the cakes finish cooking.
Details
Keep your heat around medium with hotcakes so they won’t burn while the first side is cooking. Watch for the bubbles that form in the surface. When there are lots of them, it’s time for a flip.
On Vinegared Milk, Buttermilk, Yogurt, and Beer—
You can buy buttermilk which is already sour and certainly genteel. But vinegar’s always on hand in my kitchen and making my own soured milk is cheaper. All it takes is a spoonful of vinegar to clabber a cup of milk—or if the truth be known I add the vinegar to the egg, milk, and oil, letting it do its thing right in the bowl.
There’s also yogurt which in addition to sour power has all those healthful organisms. Since it’s thicker than milk, add a little water if you go this route. Or you can skip milk products altogether and use beer like the Wild West’s grizzled prospectors did, either flat from the night before or splurging with a fresh bottle.
On a Roll with Corncakes—
I often add spaghetti squash and minced cilantro to corncakes, skipping the cheese altogether as pictured on p. 53.
Another twist is departing from the cornmeal and using leftover quinoa. An egg beaten into a half cup of salted quinoa and a little vinegar and soda yields a great batter for spooning onto the griddle.
Here a Chick, There a Chick—
Hens who get to peck around like on Old MacDonald’s Farm might be a minority at this point in history, but as Bob Dylan sang in his rusty 1960s voice, “the times, they are a-changin.” In response to pressure from the Humane Society of the United States, Ben and Jerry’s has pledged to stop using eggs from hens who live out miserable lives in batteries of cages stacked ten high in cavernous barns.
Such ideas are not new for Ben and Jerry’s. The company’s United Kingdom plant that produces ice cream for Europe has used cagefree eggs for years now. That’s because British consumers have a record dating back to 1876 of insisting farm animals be treated humanely even if they all aren’t out on Old MacDonald’s any more.
“This new ethic is conservative, not radical,” maintains Professor Bernard Rollan, who is widely recognized for pioneering the field of animal ethics and policy during the 1970s. “It is a return to the roughly fair contract those who have husbanded animals for virtually all of human history have had with animals. That of taking great pains to put one’s animals into the best possible environment one could find to meet their physical and psychological natures.”
