Recipe: Simple Mexican-themed Meal

A simple dish like pinto beans can quickly and easily become a hearty, tasty, complex-flavored dish with the addition of a few ingredients. Seen here, are the beans with all extra ingredients added, just before cooking in the pressure cooker. When pressure cooking beans, it’s NOT necessary to soak them. Simply rinse them off, throw ’em in the pot, fasten the lid, and cook away! They’re ready in a jiffy! How long’s a “jiffy”? About 15-20 minutes +/- depending upon how well you like ’em cooked. No more soaking overnight baloney!

Beans and cornbread.

There you have it!

How much more simple could it be, eh?

And honestly, that’s a meal unto itself.

If you wanted, you could add some rice to it, either separately, or mixed in.

But, we’ll just concentrate on the two, for now.

So… here’s what you’ll need for the beans & cornbread.

Are you ready!?!

• Pinto beans
• Cornmeal
• eggs
• buttermilk and/or soured milk
• canned corn
• ground beef
• oil/lard
• LARGE can crushed/diced tomatoes
• salt
• black pepper
• Badia brand “Complete” seasoning
• bacon
• baking powder
• oregano
• paprika
• cumin
• garlic – fresh, or powder
• onion (player’s choice – red, white, yellow, sweet)
• red pepper flakes and/or cayenne
• cheese – mozzarella, cheddar, Colby, or PepperJack
• 10-inch iron skillet
• coffee
• cinnamon
• coriander
• smoke flavoring/seasoning (Colgin brand ONLY)
• Worcestershire sauce (Lea & Perrins ONLY)
• Pressure cooker

NOTE: Milk can be clabbered/curdled using a small amount of vinegar or lemon juice (both are acid). Soured milk should not be discarded, and can be used in cooking, in lieu of buttermilk or milk, and can be added to buttermilk.

If it seems like a lot of ingredients… IT IS!
And, it’s WELL WORTH IT!
Besides… any cook worth their salt will use numerous spices, herbs, and seasonings… because NOBODY BUT NOBODY enjoys bland food.

Beat the Heat with Buttermilk Popsicles?

A good and longtime friend shared recently about making buttermilk popsicles at home with family, using a recipe presumably which came from Steel City Pops, a trendy nouveau foodery in Birmingham, AL. And giving credit where credit is due, Alabama has some mighty fine eateries, and an amazing wealth in it’s diversity of food. As evidence of that fact, Chef Frank Stitt, owner of Birmingham restaurants Highlands Bar and Grill, Bottega Restaurant, and Chez Fonfon has been on the James Beard Foundation Award‘s radar for quite some time, and most recently, NPR recognized the excellent oysters produced by Murder Point Oysters using farming methods in that Bayou La Batre, Alabama Gulf Coast town, which were also feted by Chef Emeril Lagasse. Alabama food is a literal treasure of gastronomic proportion. And it’s not just limited to the holiest of holies… barbecue.
(👉Get your Alabama Barbecue Trail app here!👈😋)

Now, I confess an aversion to buttermilk except in cooking. And the reason, of course, is that I’ve tried it. And not just once. In fact, I recollect as a youth visiting with relatives in

The “How’s,” “Why’s,” and “Wherefore’s” of Barbecue

The annual "RC Cola & Moon Pie Festival" is held in Bell Buckle, TN. - Image by Miss Millificent via Flickr

As I had previously mentioned, barbecue is poor folks food.

Why?

Because ‘back in the day’ – even TOday – poor folks did not have electricity, and certainly did not even have the earliest of refrigerators, the venerable icebox – which was a primitive insulated cabinet into which a large block of ice was placed in the top. Why the top? If you recall your third grade science lesson, cool temperature air falls. The only ‘cooling system’ poor folks had was a creek, upon which they would build a small ‘house’ – or more accurately, a shed – to cool their food. Therefore, they did not have the luxury of storing raw meat. Not having the ability to refrigerate or freeze fresh meat meant that it had to be cooked, prepared and otherwise preserved – either through smoking, salting or other methods such as sausage making.

A common method of preserving meat was to smoke it.

Meat – again, which was most often pork – would be