Snacking State-by-State: Oklahoma III - Get out the skillet, it's time to make cornbread!

In my last post, I mentioned that Oklahoma has an official state meal (see the state info below for exactly what that is).  But because I don't have the time, money or dietary needs to make or write about such a meal, I'm cherry-picking specific recipes.  Last time I did fried okra by Georgia transplant Trisha Yearwood.  For this next post, I turn to a California girl who like Yearwood also now calls both Oklahoma and the Food Network home.

Official Name: State of Oklahoma
State Nicknames: The Sooner State
Admission to the US: November 16, 1907 (#46)
Capital: Oklahoma City (largest)
Other Important Cities: Tulsa (2nd largest), Norman (3rd largest), Broken Arrow (4th largest)
Region: Southwest, South, West; West South Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Corn Bread & BBQ; Bison
Bordered by: Kansas (north), Missouri (northeast), Arkansas (east), Texas & the Red River (south), New Mexico (west), Colorado (northwest)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: buffalo (animal), milk (beverage), white bass (fish), raccoon (furbearer animal), strawberry (fruit), white-tail deer (game animal), wild turkey (game bird), honeybee (insect - for the honey), watermelon (vegetable); "Fried okra, squash, cornbread, barbecue pork, biscuits, sausage and gravy, grits, corn, strawberries, chicken fried steak, pecan pie, and black-eyed peas" (meal - quoted from Netstate.com)
Some Famous and Typical Foods: Southern foods (qv, Official State Meal), sometimes with a Western or Southwestern flavor; Native American (specifically Cherokee) foods

Ree Drummond, star of The Pioneer Woman TV show, is originally from Oklahoma.  However, she spent many years traveling and living in Los Angeles (and meeting her husband in Chicago).  Now back in Oklahoma, she has turned out not just a TV show but a cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks - all from a blog (yes, a blogger hits it big!), The Pioneer Woman.  The blog wasn't originally about food but ranch life and homeschooling.  But one recipe must have led to another...

For the other recipe I tackled from the Official State Meal of Oklahoma™, I use Drummond's cast-iron skillet cornbread recipe, on page 102 of her cookbook.  I didn't make the pinto beans that she pairs them with - no time.  But I did zhuzh up her cornbread, following her recommendations no less: just Southwestern-ize it with chopped jalapeños!

The Recipe: Skillet Cornbread

For Drummond's cornbread you will need the following, most of which I had on hand:

* yellow corn meal (I used up just about all of what I had left with this recipe. Note to self: buy more)
* all-purpose flour
* baking powder
* salt
* baking soda
* milk (had run out of this so needed to pick some up)
* buttermilk (this I did have on hand, but in this case I had the powdered kind that you mix up with water.  My sister bought some of this over Christmas when she was visiting and had to leave it behind because it must be refrigerated.  At least I don't have to buy more buttermilk now)
* egg
* shortening
* jalapeños (I bought a few at the H Mart for less than 50¢)

Though Drummond doesn't make this suggestion, I did shred a little leftover cheddar cheese and throw that in.

Throw together the cornmeal, salt, flour and baking powder in a large bowl.

Mix it all together.

In a separate bowl (or a large measuring cup), put in the buttermilk.  In this case, I put a four tablespoons of the buttermilk powder...

...and then added a cup of water, to reconstitute a cup of buttermilk.

Yes it is frustratingly lumpy, so you must smoosh them apart.

Next add the milk.

And then add an egg and mix.

Mix in some baking soda with the buttermilk mixture.

Next add the liquid ingredients to the dry ingredients...

...and mix with a fork until just blended.

Don't overmix this stuff.

Next, melt some shortening in the microwave...

...and mix into the batter, again just until blended.

Time to chop up the jalapeños and add them to the batter.  I added two though Drummond suggests chopping one up and adding it.

I would've added the chiles, seeds and all, but most people will probably want to seed them first.

Mince the chiles and add to the batter.

Again, yes I added cheddar cheese, about a handful.

Melt a few more tablespoons of shortening in a cast-iron skillet, moving around until coated.

Pour the batter into the skillet, spread around and let cook on top of the stove for one minute.

Then put the skillet into a preheated 450° oven for about 25 minutes

Cut and serve, preferably while still hot or only a little cooled.

The cornbread I typically find comes in two categories: savory and crumbly (Southern style) and sweet, moist and cake-like (Northern, or Yankee style.  I personally have never really enjoyed this kind).  This is a third kind: savory and soft.  In retrospect, I haven't really eaten Southwestern style cornbread all that much before.  I'm thinking I like this one more than either of our "Back East" style cornbreads, Southern or Northern.  The flavor of the jalapeños jump out amid the soft cornbread, and it all is just delicious.  Definitely another keeper of a recipe.

- - - - -

Westward ho!  This cornbread was our Oklahoma finale (last musical joke, I promise).  We continue from the Southwest to the Pacific Northwest for our next state, exploring hazelnuts, salmon and all - okay just a smidgen - that Portland's food trucks have to offer in Oregon.

Sources:

Cherokee Nation.  "More About Cherokee Cooking".  The Official Site of the Cherokee Nation, 2011.  Copyright 2011 the Cherokee Nation, All Rights Reserved.

Cherokee Nation.  "Wild Onions and Scrambled Eggs".   The Official Site of the Cherokee Nation, 2011.  Copyright 2011 the Cherokee Nation, All Rights Reserved.

Drummond, Ree.  The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl.  Willliam Morrow: New York, 2009.

Lee, Hilde Gabriel.  Taste of the States: A Food History of America.  Howell Press: Charlottesville, VA, 1992.  Quoted on the Food Timeline State Foods website.

Netstate.com.  "Oklahoma State Symbols, Songs and Emblems".  Copyright 2012 Netstate.com, All Rights Reserved.

Yearwood, Trisha, with Gwen Yearwood and Beth Yearwood Bernard. Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen: Recipes from My Family to Yours. Clarkson Potter: New York, 2008.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Oklahoma" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Oklahoma".

Food Ethnography on a Budget: Romania III: Mămăligă

To finish out my brief flirtation with Romanian cuisine, I had to make a helping of what most cookbooks and websites I checked have cited as a favorite dish in and around Romania: mămăligă. Mămăligă was probably introduced from Italy, as a lot of influence has gone from Italy to Romania since Roman times (Romania literally means "New Rome" - roma nea - in Latin).

This dish is in the same family with polenta and grits, only with the fat factor kicked up a notch. Ever eaten cheese grits? I have. Ever eaten cheese grits drowning in sour cream and butter? I have not. I'm guessing you haven't either, no matter which side of the Mason-Dixon line you grew up on. But this is a good description of mămăligă - like polenta or grits, but baked and/or topped with sour cream. Mind you, it doesn't have to be sour cream - this Transylvanian version posted on The Austerity Kitchen blog doesn't even mention it, but it does include feta cheese - which is optional. It does seem, however, that Romanians love that sour taste so much, it seems par for the course that mămăligă probably should incorporate some sort of sourness.

I went back to Anisoara Stan's Romanian Cook Book and she had a few different recipes for mămăligă - a traditional version, a modern version, and so on. Doamnă Stan's more narrative recipes don't work too well for an ADD-addled brain such as mine, and in terms of ease in following, her recipe for mămăligă just wasn't working for me. So I turned elsewhere. I first turned to a beautiful new book of Eastern and Central European cooking (this is a mouthful, y'all), The Illustrated Food and Cooking of Poland, Russia and Eastern Europe, edited by Lesley Chamberlain. And that's without the subtitle, which lists cuisines ranging from Ukranian and Hungarian to German and Austrian. And yes, Romanian is also in there. This book has helpful descriptions of each European region's style of cuisine, and every recipe comes with at least a finished photo and an accompanying how-to photo - sometimes several. The Chamberlain book's mămăligă recipe is different from all the others I read about, because it is in bread form. I didn't get the impression that mămăligă was a bread, and wanted something more authentic. I found it in my copy of Jeff Smith's Frugal Gourmet on Our Immigrant Ancestors. Smith just gets giddy over, well, every recipe he writes about in this book, a broader crash course in foods of different parts of the world (his is the semester version, mine is the self-taught over the course of a week version).

Smith tells us quite bluntly that we will all definitely like mămăligă. Well with all that butter and cheese and sour cream I can see why. I just don't know how I will keep from gaining five pounds from eating this stuff.

The meal: Mămăligă


The Frugal Gourmet's incorporates the following ingredients, almost all of which I had laying around. Seriously, this cost me about $2 extra, and all I had to do was head to Whole Foods to buy some of their extra cheese pieces they have in their salad bar section. Use any combo of sharper and less sharp cheeses you have lying around, and if you have feta but no sour cream, all the better for you.

• water (hmmm, I wonder where you're gonna find that? You need 1 1/2 quarts of it)
  
• yellow cornmeal, the finer the better (had a whole bag of this - you'll only need 1 1/2 cups. It has to be yellow - mămăligă isn't made from white corn meal)
• 1 cup sour cream (left over from the ciorbă)
• 1/2 stick of butter (got it)
• cheese - lots and lots of cheese (for this I had about 0.15 lb of Havarti laying around. I then went out and spent two more dollars on some small pieces of Irish Dubliner and Ohio's own Guggisberg Swiss. I had planned to add some Parmesan, but ended up not needing it.

Mmmm. Cornmeal mush.

The process is simple: boil the water, take it off the heat, slowly stir in the cornmeal and put the pot back on the heat, stirring frequently for 20 minutes until the cornmeal mush is the consistency of "thick cake batter" (Smith's words, not mine). While doing that, melt the butter in an 8" square pan in a 350°F oven. Pour half the mămăligă "batter" into the pan, then spread half the sour cream on top and sprinkle half the cheese on top of that. Repeat with the other half of the ingredients, and bake until the cheese is browned on top. I chose to put it under the broiler for a few minutes afterwards.

The best way to describe mămăligă is rich. All of that cornmeal layered with cheeses and sour cream and butter, and I could not eat very much in one sitting (also some advice: if you're just recovering from a Crohn's or colitis flare up, you might want to hold off on the mămăligă, or else just eat a wee bit). It's a good if heavy accompaniment to ghiveci, and a nice complement to your meatball ciorbă.

On to a new year and a new culture in my quest to better know cuisines I know little about. Since it is cold and snowy here, more so than I ever remember in December, I'm really jonesin' for warmth. So my next stop is taking me to the tropics. Just where I'm not telling yet.

Sources of recipes:

Romanian Cook Book, by Anisoara Stan (1951: Castle, Secaucus, NJ); republished 1969, 1983 - ciorbă de perisoare cu carne, vegetable ghiveci

The Illustrated Food and Cooking of Poland, Russia and Eastern Europe: Discover the Cuisines of Russia, Poland, the Ukraine, Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria and the Balkans, edited by Lesley Chamberlain (2009: Lorenz Books, London, England, UK) - general background on Romanian cuisine

The Frugal Gourmet on Our Immigrant Ancestors, by Jeff Smith (1990: William Morrow & Company, New York, NY) - mămăligă