Johnny Cakes

While researching cuisine I came upon several books in our public library about food in colonial America.  I checked several of them out but I only ended up reading one: The Colonial Cookbook by Lucille Recht Penner.  It was a very fun book to read and I learned a lot, like how the first settlers arriving in America were ill-prepared and by the time the second set of settlers arrived with more provisions the few survivors left were boiling their shoes for food.  Something I thought was interesting, and I wish we still did today, was that the colonists hardly wasted anything, they found uses for almost every part of an animal and learned how to preserve an abundant array of foods.
After I read the first part of this book, I flipped through the recipes in the back looking for a 'final project'.  I came across a simple recipe called Johnny Cakes.  Johnny Cakes were small cornbread pancakes that were usually served with butter and maple syrup and, like many colonial foods, they could be eaten cold or warm. I had a lot of fun making them and they tasted super delicious, especially when eaten with jelly or maple cream.

Johnny Cakes

• 1 cup cornmeal
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup boiling water
• 1/2 cup milk

Put the cornmeal and the salt in a mixing bowl.  Stir until thoroughly mixed, now add the water (I'm not sure why the water has to be boiling but that's just what the book told me to do).  Stir until the mixture is smooth.  Now you add the milk. 
Grease a large skillet and put it on a medium heat on the stove.  Use a tablespoon and drop the batter onto the skillet.  Let the cakes sit for five minutes until they're golden brown on the bottom then flip them over and wait another five minutes.  Serve with butter, syrup, honey, jelly, jam, maple cream, or peanut butter.

adding the cornmeal 

 cornmeal and salt (nothing special)

 after the water is added

 after the milk is added

 batch number one

 I got impatient with the little blighters and began flipping them a bit early

  Soooooo good!

Topic the First: Cuisine

Megan:

Radishes, mushrooms

Avacados and sprouts

Make the best sandwhich

For hungry young louts

Amanda:

Oh, radishes are sweet

Mushrooms are fine

But I want you upstairs

It'd be most divine

Megan:

If I eat it real fast

My stomach will bloat

My guts will all cramp

I'll bleat like a goat

Amanda:

Please don't do that

I'd cry and I'd wail

And plus you might also

Puke in the pail

Megan:

No bleats and no wails

No buckets or pails

I come up the stairs

With the wind in my sails!

And so it begins . . .

Here be the gist: Sisters in the land of Blog.  Cursed to embark continually on flights of fancy, quests after quarry, discoveries of destiny, journeys through the jumble, voyages for visions, and marches into the melee. 

Translation: We, Amanda and Megan, bound together by fate and limited living space make a daring leap into the digital world.  After one semester of rooming together, we find ourselves in need of an outlet for the abundant energy created by our coexistence, direction for the dreams induced by our proximity.  Blogging seemed the (un)natural choice.  And so here we, self-proclaimed Ravenclaws (also HP fanatics), intend to record our forays into subjects varied and vast. 

First and foremost, this blog will be the bulletin board of our new year's project:  Like any Ravenclaws, we are not satisfied with simply learning in the classroom.  The world is our classroom!  Every two weeks we will begin a new extracurricular inquiry into a randomly drawn topic.  Our ways may diverge as we choose different aspects of topiary or taxidermy or what-have-you to examine, but we will always have the common room to come back to. 

This is not to say that other topics than what has been chosen won't be smuggled in here somehow.  I'm sure Miyazaki will turn up when we're supposed to be researching South American vegetation, or our latest Youtube favorites when we should be pouring over shoe polish. 

That's the somewhat overweight skinny. 

Fin.