Belated Happy New Year to my reader! Did you get your Hoppin' John this New Year's Day?
I like to make Jalapeño Cornbread with the peas and greens and all that. The fun part this year was using peppers that we grew in our pepper patch along the back fence. I froze them right off the plant in a plastic container. They thawed out just as beautifully as they went in, bright green.
I followed the recipe on the Bob's Red Mill Organic Yellow Corn Meal the way I always have to follow cornbread recipes that do not originate from my childhood family kitchen -- no sugar, a pinch extra salt, and buttermilk instead of milk, Clabber Girl baking powder -- no self-rising meal. I added a small can of whole kernel yellow corn with chopped bell peppers, a cup of cheese, and chopped chilis (jalapeños). I cut out the veins and seeds before chopping the peppers -- that's where the most hot comes from and not everyone in my household likes the same degree of hot that I like. I would like to run into a firey seed now and then, but it would be too much for Chiclette, not that she would touch my cornbread, anyway.
I made the same mistake my brother, Robert, ran into the summer he harvested his habaneros. He picked okra and squash before the peppers. If you've ever picked okra, you know how prickly the leaves and stems are, but maybe the damage is not evident unless you pick habaneros afterward. Merely picking the peppers and walking with them in his hands into the kitchen set his hands afire. If you handle chopped peppers, even an imperceptible whiff of juice or accidental contact with the knife blade or cutting board after de-veining, the capsaisin will burn into any bit of chapped or microscopically lacerated skin and stay there until some combination of washing, soaking in milk or other lactic acid like yogurt, and dilution by the skin's fluids gradually draws it away. I felt the peppers in my hands all afternoon. At least my hands did not swell like balloons the way Robert's did that day.
Diane gave me two nice ham bones left over and frozen from Thanksgiving for the pork meat usually called for in Hoppin' John. There was a generous amount of meat to pick off after boiling the bone with the black-eyed peas. We had such a wonderful gathering with those hams at Thanksgiving, so maybe some of the warm and generous energy of that day will follow us into the New Year.
Welcome, 2008, Happy New Year, love, health, and wealth to all my loved ones!
