Do you know the secret to soft cornbread?
We do! You mix the corn meal with your water or milk (or, in our case, “milk.”) You let it sit for at least five minutes. THEN you add your other ingredients. Any powder add-ins that aren’t flour ought to go in before the flour. In this case, I added some garlic powder for a hint of garlic in my cornbread.
I’m crazy, what can I say?
Adapted Indian Head White Corn Meal traditional cornbread recipe:
TRADITIONAL CORN BREAD
1 cup Indian Head White Corn Meal
1 cup all-purpose flour (almond)¼ cup sugar
¼ teaspoon salt3 teaspoons baking powder
¼ cup oil
1 cup milk (soy)1 egg, beaten
Corn Bread:
Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Combine corn meal and milk and allow to sit for 10 minutes after mixing well. (This is where the corn meal hydrates and gets super soft.) Add salt and oil, making sure to incorporate these completely before adding the almond flour. [If you’re adding some sort of flair, do it before the almond flour goes in… it’s far easier to mix it thoroughly that way.] Bake in a greased standard bread loaf pan for 35-40 minutes. Allow to rest in oven for 10 minutes (or longer) to ensure it is cooked through.
Next time, I’m going to add 1 tbs of cinnamon and 1/4 cup of Swerve. Then I’ll make a sugar-free Swerve icing to drizzle over the top and see what happens. [I’m super cray cray, what can I say?]
Now imagine that with some plant butter. Get away from my plant butter, you heathens! It’s mine!!!
Okay, we’re going to switch to brushing oil where we’d put butter, but in the meanwhile, I have some plant butter and I’m going to use it.
I almost want to turn the garlic version into an open faced sandwich with turkey and mayo on it, honestly. [Yup. I just went there.] What’s wrong? You can’t think of a way to use a mildly garlic-flavored cornbread? Or is it that you just lurve cornbread and you’d gobble it up solo? Okay, I could do that, but I haven’t had “bread” I could eat for months. [Did I mention the crust is perfection? I know I’ll never recreate this, but I’m going to try. I swear I’ll follow the same steps and it’ll be different… probably cuz I forgot to start the timer immediately.]
I could try something similar without corn meal at all and see if I end up with toastable sammy bread. Alas, the bread pan still has cornbread in it so it has to wait. I’m alright with that.
You know what else this girl who can barely eat fucking food is eating today? Oh, wait. You don’t care yet. You’re not almost dead doing the same fucking thing I did. But you will care. It’s coming.
I cored four delicious gala apples (skin on) and layered them in the bottom of a 9×9 pan (the kind you use for brownies, bro.) I measured out about half a cup of brown sugar Swerve and equal amount of almond flour, then I mixed those together thoroughly. If I’d thought about it, I might’ve added the apple pie spice then, but that didn’t happen, so I sprinkled it over the top. It worked. It was everything I wanted. Not too sweet, not too sticky, and very apple-y. [In my world, I get about 20 flavors, so this is a success, tyvm.] I baked this at 350F for 35 minutes. Then, because my oven is derpy, it returned to a boil sitting on the rear burner while I was making yams in there.
I ate a little yam, but I don’t think it’s agreeing with me. The corn bread is doing alright, though I need blue corn meal. It’s the lowest sugar content.
I thought about putting some avo slices on the cornbread but I haven’t gotten there yet.
I’ve had about ten cups of coffee. [I’m being hyperbolic but really it’s too much coffee no matter how I dice it.] I even put some nutmeg in there to see if I could imitate a bit of an egg nog flavor. It wasn’t fantastic, sadly.
That’s all I’ve eaten today despite being up since 7 a.m. I’m meaning to throw a roast in the oven shortly because I made my bird a week ago. I decided since I am the only person making food, IDGAF if we have turkey on turkey day or not. I’m going to make one once a month until it’s hot again probably. It’s a very inexpensive meat with the bones included. Plus, plenty of places sell it year round. I figure I’d do another roast/turkey combo for Christmas, though I suppose I could make my parents a ham. I cannot eat piggy, but they sure will… especially if I broil it in water to remove all the salt (and, incidentally, flavor, but they’re old people that smoke, what do they know? They have no taste buds left.)
I actually have proof they have no taste buds left… my dad went to the hospital and declared their Jello didn’t taste right to him. It’s fucking Jello. It tastes the same no matter what package to package. It’s why people buy fucking Jello, bro. But somehow my home cooked little packet of gelatin was supposed to be different. As if.
Then my mom is craving cinnamon rolls. I am going to ice them in Swerve mixed with soy milk and see if she really wants them so badly then. I’m going to tell you now that I happen to know they won’t get eaten altogether in one sitting if I do that to her, and here’s why: Swerve kills candida yeast. The cinnamon roll (Pillsbury) will feed it with yeast and gluten-y goodness, and then the Swerve will murder it. She will eat one and then pass on the rest, not knowing why.
If you know a sweets binge-eater, this is their cure, y’all. Coat that fucking shit in Swerve icing or put it on top with some flour (non-wheat) and oil so it creates a sticky bun kind of crust, or even put it on the bottom like I did with my birthday cake. Your binge-eater will stop binging. Guaranteed! Or I’ll reiki heal you for free!
I put some on the yams, too, and hardly any has disappeared before I put it away. She had some of my (lazy AF) crustless apple pie streusel and then left the rest be (or maybe that was my dad… I wasn’t babysitting, just noticed some was missing, which is cool… feast day away!)
I’d be baking even more but I need a break from the smoke… there’s some oil over the bottom of the oven that I need to mop up. But that isn’t why it got stupid smokey in the house… Nay. It was because my mother made a scratch pumpkin pie yesterday and the crust fell off into the oven and she just left it that way. I get it… she’s too fucking lazy to do anything but burn the house down. (It would have, if I didn’t figure out there was a piece of crust in the oven burning to cinder, because it would have set the oil on fire again and I am not so sure we’ll get so lucky with a second oven fire, y’know? That’s all I need for Christmas… to be truly shelter-less. Now that I’ve written it all out, I’ll remember to actually clean it this time.)
I’m not really mad at her… At least she made the pie by herself after I discovered that I was basically truly fucked after a day of shopping; my back was giving me agony levels of pain thanks to my shitty everyday bootses. I could have worn the knee-high boots but it was overkill. I could’ve worn the sneakers if I realized how much snow had melted, but I didn’t. Whoops. And God picked my shoes yesterday, too.
So I spent hours and hours doing physical therapy, trying to get out of pain again. Those shoes have a soft heel, that’s the problem with them. The heel doesn’t have enough support. SO… I guess I need new boots with a harder heel and Goodwill can have those ones. Or I might free-sale a bunch of shit in spring, too, since I hate the accumulation of material goods that has happened. Nothing has a great value individually but I suppose it could fetch a few bucks… if I liked people enough to do anything more than set up a table outside for people to just take whatever they like. I wouldn’t even sit at it. I bet the table would walk off, too. I might not need it.
I don’t really want it, either, being a plastic folding table.
Did I mention I’m mentally ill?
Anyway, I made some crappy envelopes of gravy… now I’m trying to decide how to make my scratch gravy. I seem to be having trouble with corn starch, which is probably because it’s yellow corn at the base. [It’s GMO, you know. I seem to be unable to process GMO anything.] So there’s another food I’ll have to make when I take over the world with proper health food products.
What? You think all this experimentation is just for me? I’m just the first of many who are going to be struggling to eat in about six weeks here. If I could open my own food joint quickly to test the flavors of my recipes with people who currently eat sugar and gluten and all the rest out there, then the quicker I can move to put my version of food in the grocery stores. I even have a business model that nobody is going to be able to beat. Ever.
Thank you, Sir God. You’re very good to me. I don’t regret promising to cure the world of all disease, clean up the oceans, and save the forests and rainforests. I don’t regret promising to allow you to control all the funds because I know you know where they’re needed the most. Thank you for giving me the means to own sixteen different businesses. Thank you for supporting me in my time of need when nobody else believed in me or helped me. Thank you for defending me from those who will come forward to try to tell lies about me once I am a well-known entrepreneur that has unlimited success world-wide. Thank you for taking care of me forevermore.
I’m sorry I’ve been such a burden and a whiny bitch from time to time, even though I know that’s not precisely my fault. Thank you for letting me continue to drink coffee even though it dilutes my healing potential. Thank you for helping me intuit recipes. Thank you for fighting for my freedom. Thank you for establishing my boundaries firmly. Thank you for finding me a husband before everyone in the world wants to take that place. Thank you again for finding me a husband at all, you big softie romantic! Thank you for fixing my back and healing me so I’m no longer in pain every single moment of every single day. Thank you for explaining what rape and fornication are to me. Thank you for never giving up on me even though I gave up on me so many times. Thank you for not yelling at me too much for all the mistakes I make and continue to make. I’m sorry I still can’t be motivated to try my very best. I’m sorry for all the creatures I kill that aren’t on my dinner plate. I’m sorry for all the asparagi and broccoli I fail to kiss before I throw perfectly good stalks away instead of being a good little girl and chopping them up to eat them. I promise my food biz will use as much stalk as possible. Thank you for leading me one bread crumb at a time, like Gretel, to the finish line you envisioned for us. (Hansel, too.) Thank you for your patience. And thanks for torturing the crap out of me, she adds, tongue-in-cheek.
Angel-Sansara 