Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire 2014 East Texas Gathering

Man this thread sure makes me homesick ,nothing like a Texas get together.Love Alaska,but don't nobody really know how to do it up here.They can get drunked up real good.

Robert's Meat Market. "You can beat our prices, but you can't beat our meat.".

What sides should we be thinking about for lunch & dinners? Coleslaw? Potatoes of some sort? Rice? I make a mean Pico De Gallo, mild or wild.

Ed

I have 20 lbs of rice of some kind in a big sack. Bought it month or so ago. Happy to bring that.
Missed your glasses comment yesterday. You remember needing excuses for the shooting.
45 years I have had contacts. May now be back in glasses for a long while (rest of life). Good excuse right. Hope to have current (new) by April. See what the doc says.

I can make my potato salad.
It's what my family has been making for three or four generations. One of Pat's buddies helped me out with it a couple of years ago and made it better. Which is amazing because I thought it was perfect before.

Gotta have some red beans.

Red beans it is! I'm thinking some cornbread needs to accompany this feast along with the obligatory white bread.

I know some folks like their cornbread sweet and others not. What do y'all think?

Ed

Sweet? Yuck.

What he said. miles

Carrie-Style Corn Bread

2 cups coarsely ground yellow corn meal
1 egg
� cup shortening (bacon drippings, preferably) or peanut oil
2 to 2� cups whole milk
1 tsp salt
1 Tbs baking powder
0 tsp sugar (imperative!)
��1 cup fine bacon bits (optional Ken Howell touch)

Heat the oven to 375� to 450� F while you mix the batter.

Heat 1 or 2 Tbs of the shortening or oil in a 10-inch cast-iron skillet until it smokes (if it�s peanut oil, it won�t smoke).

Stir the egg, the bacon fat or oil, the milk, the salt, the baking powder, and the bacon bits into the corn meal until the batter is smooth.

Pour the batter into the hot skillet. If the skillet is as hot as it should be, the edges and the bottom of the batter begin to sizzle, crinkle, and turn brown immediately.

Bake about 15 to 20 minutes at 375� to 450� F until the top is dark golden brown and speckled. (Bacon bits will add to the speckling.)

Turn the bread onto a plate � slide it back into the skillet � and bake it until the bottom is as brown as the top.

Quarter the bread, then serve the quarters hot. (Carrie always did.)

Slit a quarter open horizontally with your table knife, lay the top back � and you�ll have to use another knife to butter it. (Or you can, as my grandfather did, quench the hot knife in your iced tea!) The hot knife cuts butter easily but then won�t carry a pat of butter away from the butter dish.

Just buttered, with any main course � or with genuine, pure ribbon-cane syrup� � or with honey � this is eatin� too good for kings!

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�No, not sorghum or blackstrap, and certainly not cut with corn syrup!

Makes my mouth water just reading that, Ken!

I'm in the "no sugar" camp, but I know some folks are. Maybe I'll bake a pan of Jiffy mix for the sugar crowd.

Ed

That'd be three of us.

One reason that cornbread goes so well with red beans is that neither benefit from little gourmet touches.

I like sweet corn bread

Does that mean you are going to honor us with your presence?

Ed

Me too, with certain things, just not beans and BBQ.

I'd love to but don't think I can make it this go round and I do love TX!

I do must still have some yankee stuck in me

It's worth a few miles of driving to get real, genuine, stone-ground yellow corn meal.

Store-boughten stuff just ain't as good, somehow.

Brookshire's grocery here has fresh, genuine stone-ground cornmeal. It's all I use to make cornbread or to cook with. It comes from a grist mill that ONLY mills corn the old-fashioned way.

Ed

Somehow, I was pretty confident that down there, the good stuff would be close-by and easy to find. Just keep the sugar out of it. Maple syrup is an OK alternative to ribbon-cane syrup after the bread comes out of the oven. But NO sugar in the batter!