"corn muffins" news and stories

How close to "from scratch" are you willing to go? Would you, say, grind your own corn for cornmeal? Buy some artisanal stone-ground meal? Or make these corn-and-pepper muffins starting with a box of muffin mix and add some jalapeño chiles and red and green peppers? One is no more noble than the other; it's the simple act of baking them and handing them to people you like that's the thing.

Someone, somewhere is going to grind that corn, though, and if you decide you want to go back to the essentials, you may want to arm yourself with a Vita-Mix blender or a good coffee mill, according to this how-to story in Mother Earth News. A coarse grind will give you plenty of texture, medium is great for breads, and a fine grind is better for dusting baking pans.

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Warm corn-bread muffins with butter and raspberry preserves -- breakfast doesn't get much better than this. Mini or grande makes no difference. Blogger my_amii went the small route, and serves them straight up (here's her recipe). But feel free to give your muffins some playmates. Marcus Samuelsson lays on the jalapeños in this recipe. Or try this cranberry-pistacho combo. In Kitchen Daily contributor Gina Marie Miraglia Eriquez's recipe, she gets right to the heart of my corn-muffin cravings by stuffing them with preserves.

And after reading about high-fructose corn syrup and corn for ethanol and how our farmland is turning into one big cornfield to feed cattle, isn't it a relief to get back to talking about corn as just plain corn?

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Sloppy Joe. Photo: gezellig-girl.com, Flickr

• Aww... Sloppy Joe loses its spotlight to a cousin -- the salsa-infused Sloppy Jose.
• Avocados can be whipped into more than just guacamole -- try some Avocado Fries.
• Peppers are hitting farm stands, including the tiny and tasty Yum Yum peppers.
• Mushroom lovers rejoice -- it's National Mushroom Month. Get your 'shroom on with Mini Quiche Caps.
• Houston writer Greg Morago says, "Don't be sheepish about eating lamb."
• Meijer makes Moose Tracks mint-flavored.
• Picking out the right ears and dishing up Corn-Corn Muffins.
• Good Stuff finds a green-onion recall, food events and funky dishes.

Did you know that states have "official" foods. Yup, and Massachusetts is no exception. The foods include Boston Cream Pie, cranberries, baked beans, chocolate chip cookies, and corn muffins (corn muffins?).

Gridskipper takes that list of foods and tells us what restaurants in Boston serve the best ones. For example, though Boston Cream Pie was invented at the Omni Parker House Hotel (also home of the Parker House Rolls), you can get the best one at The Oak Room at the Copley Plaza Hotel. For beans, head on over to the Blue Ribbon BBQ. They're not traditional baked beans, but they're great (and I can vouch for this place - best BBQ I've ever had. If they were closer to my house I'd probably eat there twice a week).

[thanks to Jade Walker]

The most popular cornbread mix on the market is Jiffy, and even though homemade is still the top choice of cornbread loves, it is a close second. It isn't the only cornbread mix on the market and in the last year, after very stagnant sales of muffin mixes - including cornbread - Betty Crocker decided that it was time to try and revamp their product to compete with Jiffy. The problem for them was that, even though they had a good product and Jiffy only advertised through word of mouth, they had a hard time driving up sales.

A General Mills executive decided to do a little in-house research with the help of some of the company's African American employees, based on the fact that African Americans account for more than one third of all cornbread sales in the US. What he found was that they didn't buy Betty Crocker either. One employee even said "I'd never eat Betty Crocker cornbread because it's not for black people."

With the feedback from the employees and not much else, the company tweaked the packaging to feature skillet cornbread, rather than corn muffins, and approached B. Smith for endorsement and to be a spokesperson for their healthy-eating "Serving Up Soul" campaign. The endorsement of a respected, award-winning chef and restaurateur gave the rebranded cornbread a little more credibility, and sales got a boost - rising almost 25% in the last year.

Source