HAPPY BIRTHDAY P D- B

Quaker (TM) is the big milled grains company in the United States. Most people immediatley think Quaker Oats, because they're the big oatmeal company in the United States. They make Quaker Instant Oatmeal, too--you put it in a bowl, pour boiling water on it, stir it up and let it sit a couple of minutes and voilà, oatmeal.

They're no dumbies, either. In the South you can buy Quaker grits, and they sell Quaker Instant Grits, too--just pour in some boiling water.



This one is red-eye gravy and "country" ham flavored.

I've bought Quaker grits. They're all right.

I usually buy yellow ones from the bulk bin.

BTW, I once read that Quaker, was the first brand name in America.

Vinegar? Hmmm... so that's the missing piece of the puzzle. I knew there was a bit of sourness in it. Have tried it with variations of whole milk, skim milk, yogurt and sour cream. Haven't tried buttermilk yet... I'll have to go back to the starting line and give that vinegar a try.

do it gently. Ive never added more than a tsp total. BUt sugar is the secret to balancing the taste.(It gets the "roux" taste out)

Grits, huh? Reminds me of the train trip to the Army induction center. The boys with a Northern background took it with sugar and a spot of mile. Probably though it was some smelly kind of cream of wheat. Southerners used butter. Them boys knew their grits.

well, any culture that would fry a turkey and eat carp, would certainly love a grit.

" Grits Gourmet" is an oxymoron.

I like grits once in a while..
not lately, though.
I love good feisty polenta with a rich sauce or even a non rich sauce.. I make it the old fashioned way. Will need to try the Bittman take on it one of these days.

splain

oh great, now Ive gotta look up Bittman meself.

Thanks for all the descriptions. I've hardly ever eaten corn meal. It's definitely not a staple up here. My mother made a corn meal type bread a few times, it was sweet, and I'm sure an aberration of whatever recipe book she found it in.
I tried polenta once, it tasted like the greasy pan it came out of. I'm now learning grits are supposed to taste that bland and it's up to the diner to make it palatable. Who knew? I'll have to give it another go.
I've neither seen or tasted the gravies. And scrapple... I'd give it a good honest attempt. I would. I ate a white gravy once, in a Seattle restaurant. It was horrible. I wasn't sure what the purpose was, white gravy on mashed potatoes, a greasy, heavy mix.
I'll have to go to the source I guess. When I make it to the south, I'll give it a good honest effort.

In fact, i'll bet you have had corn meal on a regular basis. Peameal bacon does not use peameal, and hasn't for quite a long time. It was originally called peameal bacon because it would be coated with the meal of dried yellow peas. But these days, and for many years past, peameal bacon is coated in yellow corn meal. (Corn meal comes in yellow or white. Yellow corn meal is from field corn ground with the hull on; white corn meal is ground from field corn from which the hull has been removed by milling.) In Ontario, at least, your back bacon will always be described as peameal bacon, but actually coated with corn meal. I don't know, of course, if the back bacon in the prairie provinces is normally called peameal, and actually coated in corn meal. But if your back bacon is called peameal, you've actually been eating corn meal.

Good corn bread is very flavorful, and someone with great skill at making it can make quite a fine product. Back in the day, when i routinely made my own cornbread, i could make a light corn bread with the consistency of cake. It was good for all corn bread recipes except hush puppies, which do better with a coarser consistency. For those who don't know, hush puppies are balls of deep-fried corn meal batter. As with all such recipes, each cook will add their own ingredients. One gentleman i knew use to make hush puppies for his father and brother, and he added black pepper, finely diced red and green bell peppers and finely diced onion and garlic. That was great skill, because the more **** you add, the harder it is to make a ball of batter to go into the deep fry.

I like their (Pillsbury's) crescent rolls.
I also like their cinnamon rolls - hot out of the oven- with the glaze drippy and warm.

Buiscuit-wise - I prefer Bojangles or Cracker Barrel biscuits to Pillsbury's- with honey and butter.
I like the way they bring you a basket of the biscuits and cornbread at Cracker Barrel so you can have one with gravy, one with butter and strawberry preserves - one with honey - or one with just butter.
That's probably the reason I don't order a main entree - except the vegetable plate. I fill up on the bread- and they're not to big and heavy so you don't feel like you're really eating that much.
I like Jiffy mix cornbread too - it's light and sweet.

Making good milk gravy is an art - I like it thinner rather than thicker - one wrong move with the flour and it makes it heavy and gloppy like wall paper paste. But when it's done right - it's an art form - it's probably one of my favorite foods in the world .
I like buscuits and gravy with bacon or sausage - I can take or leave the eggs - but a side of cantaloupe is an awesome accompaniment.
At my grandmothers, we used to eat biscuits with figs she'd preserved. She had a fig tree in her yard.
And we'd wash it down with iced tea. Even at breakfast. It's tea- just cold.
Probably a southern thing.

I also really like corned beef hash with just a drop of maple syrup and two poached or runny fried eggs.

a really well done white gravy will have an iridescence while finishing cooking. The sheen is a sign that its time to eat.

Ive had hush puppies with everything in em except the kitchen sponge. THey can be a real treat as a "Side" in a typical meat and three dinner in the Piedmont of VA or NC.

Im a sutherner at heart. Cept I dont worship Jeb STuart as many do.

Hush puppies are good with a fish fry and/or barbecue and slaw.

Yeah - one of my favorite lyrics in any song ever is by Jesse Winchester (a southerner) who said (in Nothing but a Breeze):
'Me I want to live with my feet in Dixie and my head in the cool, blue North'.

I couldn't have expressed it better myself. I feel lucky and that it's enriched my cultural experience of the US that that's pretty much the upbringing I was given.

There is something special about the south - especially the food.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0MEHSZyD9Q&feature=related

"Worship" is à propos, although most people don't know it. James Ewell Brown Stuart (nobody in Virginia called him "Jeb") was an Anglican (common inVirginia, and the unofficial established religion of the United States Military Academy before the war), but more than that, he was an enthusiast, an evangelical. One of the reaons he admired Thomas Jackson was the man's piety. They made a strange pair, but they were close friends. Stuart used to tease Jackson all the time, to which Jackson's response was usually a blush and some mumbling. Jackson was a harsh disciplinarian, but he was gentle with young officers and with Stuart. Jackson had gone right through the war in the old blue tunic of the Virginia Military Insitute, and an old, greasy blue kepi. Stuart got Jackson's measurements, and had his Richmond tailor make a luxurious suit of gray, a general officer's uniform. He presented it to Jackson, who wore it for the first time on at Fredericksburg in December, 1862. Stuart and Longstreet immediately began to tease him about, and because it was Stuart, he blushed and mumbled a response.

But religion was what really bound them as friends. At Stuart's instigation, he and Jackson organized a corps of chaplains for the Army of Northern Virginia. Of a Sunday, when they were in the same operational area, Stuart would go "pick up" Jackson, and they'd go find an open air religious service, or a tent meeting, and slip in quietly to sit in the back and enjoy the preaching. The "bold cavalier" image of Stuart is hard to reconcile with this undisputable characteristic of his. I find him a fascinating character, but certainly, neither Stuart nor any other military leader is deserving worship.

Also, them boys at a lots and lots of corn bread, more as the war dragged on.

the usual request would be "Anybody know where STuarts got his corps?"

I once wrote a short story for a class in English comp (it was to be a story based upon facts in history).
I had Stuart go on a major gold theft at the Cornwall mines when he just disappeared , before the GEttysburg campaign. My story won a contest and it was all made up bullshit with just a smattering of facts as the glue .


I heard something about the way history was taught in the schools of Eastern Tennessee.
"Wed spend one week on the Revolutionary war, one week on the first world war and another week on the second world war, then the rest of the semester wed spend on JEB Stuart".

For just plain body whittling aggressiveness , my fav is John Bell Hood. Not the greatest general, especially at the end, but a real interesting general.

I'm surprised. Eastern Tennessee was a hotbed of Union sympathizers during that war. That's why Andrew Johnson became Lincoln's running mate in 1864 (he was from eastern Tennessee). The Confederates long laid siege to Knoxville, including Longstreet while he was in Tennessee. They failed to take the city, though, which was defended in World War One fashion, with elaborate trench systems, "pre-registered" artillery fields of fire, and even concertina wire laid out in "no-man's land." They must have made a push after the war to re-educate eastern Tennesse to a proper appreciation of lost cause mythology.

Took a trip to Nashville one spring and ate either cornbread or grits with every meal. Stopped at a Kroger on the way home and bought a box of Jiffy cornbread mix and a box of instant grits. Enjoyed the corn bread -- the grits, not so much. First morning in Texas hubby couldn't figure out why there was cream of mushroom soup on the breakfast buffet -- we never did develop a taste for sausage gravy. Loved the iced tea though. Nothing up here in the frozen north comparable.

HA! It is an acquired taste. I originally hated scrapple as a kid>

I was at a business lunch in some joint in Bedford Pa once where the guy I was meeting insisted on the salad bar (I hate salad bars, they are fetid teeming cesspits of snot and vermin)
He went and loaded a great bowl with everything and then, without questioning , put a huge scoop of "dressing" on top. It wasnt dressing, it was chocolate pudding.

I was laughing all the way east on the PA Turnpike.

The Cumberlands and the Appalachians were some of the "spots" of union loyalists. Gov Harris was able to convince the state to turn and secede even after Bells proposal was accepted a few months earlier.
My friend who mae the statement about JEB Stuart, was an engineer at the Milan ARmy Ammo depot, which is between Memphis and NAshville. The issue of slavery and how the growers felt put upon by this Lincoln character, did eventually turn the state to the CSA..

Ive seen some Union regimental colors from a "peace" museum at Oak Ridge (they got some artifacts from the Knoxville area). Obviously it was more than just VP Johnson who was a unionist.


Heres some of the artifact sources I saw at Oak Ridge. These 2 artillery units were regiments that were Union from Tennessee. It turns out that there were about no less than 40.