Becky Says...

September 16, 2000

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A Cooking Tip

Don't confuse the cornmeal with the grits. It happened at our house one time, with some rather interesting results...

My mother was fixing cornbread to serve with dinner one night. She had decided to make it as individual servings---larger than a muffin, but much smaller than a regular cake of it.

After it was cooked, she brought the bread to the table, and we got ready to eat. I tried to slice my serving, to put some butter on it. But the knife wouldn't penetrate the crust. I thought that was strange, but decided to just break the bread with my hands.

I managed to get that done, and a bit of butter on it. Next step was to bite into it, of course. Ordinarily, that's a pleasure. Not this time! I thought I was trying to bite into a slab of rock.

Of course, Mother was having similar results. She apologized for the consistency, and we were both mystified as to what in the world had caused her to make what we were by this time referring to as concrete.

Mother was afraid she had set the oven too high, so she got up from the table and went to look at the setting. Nope, it was right where it should be. And we both knew when she had put the bread in to cook, so we were sure it hadn't stayed in too long.

I joined her in the kitchen, still pondering the concrete mystery. Then all of a sudden I solved it. I noticed that the package of grits had been opened, and the cornmeal had not. Mother had used two cups of grits in the recipe, along with a cup-and-a-half of milk.

Grits are ground, dried hominy, in case you're not familiar with them. And it takes a lot more liquid to reconstitute them than it does to make cornmeal into batter. When the grits "batter" was baked, it dried out quickly.

The error had happened because the packages were the same size and both products had been made by the same company, so the package style was very similar, especially from the back---and the back of the cornmeal was facing me on the counter.

With the mystery solved, we went back to the table, finished our dinner (minus cornbread, of course), and thought of ways to use the concrete.

Too bad we already had walkways.

Have any cooking stories you'd like to share with the group? Here's the place!

Text � copyright 2000 Becky