What Do I Do with All This Cornmeal?

Around the middle of January, my husband got a text from a friend.  He wasn't a close friend, but someone we'd known for almost thirty years from church.  He taught the Sunbeam (Sunday School) classes for both of our sons when they were very young and was famous for bringing graham crackers for his little charges every week.  That and Polaroid camera pictures that the three-year-olds were absolutely fascinated with.  Nice guy.
Anyway, he retired a little ways back and he and his wife decided to move to Colorado to be closer to their children.  (And now, in this midst of this pandemic, I'm wondering whether they wish they'd kept all this food.)  He knew our girls raised animals of some sort, and did we want his food storage for them?  He told Aaron there were twenty-seven buckets of red wheat.

This wasn't the first time we'd been offered old food storage for animals.  The girls are happy for free feed, and the sheep look at wheat as a treat.  So of course, we snapped it up.

But this was the first time that we'd been given good quality stuff, properly packaged with a nitrogen flush and stored well.  Twenty-seven identical six-gallon buckets from Walton's Feed.  The buckets weren't dated, but the labels had been printed on an early dot-matrix printer.  So I'd guess they're at least twenty-five years old.  Probably more.

Anyway, it wasn't all red wheat.  Mixed in with the red wheat were three buckets of cornmeal.  What the heck was I going to do with that much cornmeal?  One can only eat so much cornbread, and I have never in my life made anything but cornbread with cornmeal, unless you count sprinkling pans with it for baking pizza or bagels.  And besides, I'd always read that cornmeal has a pretty short shelf-life.

Before spending too much time wondering what to do with it, I figured I ought to find out whether it was any good.

The first test was to open up the bucket and dab a little on my tongue.  And I did it a couple of times, just to be sure.  No problem.  So I made a batch of cornbread, and we were all pretty happy--and shocked--to learn that the cornbread tastes just fine.

But still, one hundred twenty pounds is a lot of cornmeal.  And in six-gallon buckets.  There's just no way I can open a big bucket like that and expect that it won't go rancid before I get to the bottom.  I mean, I don't think I've used that much cornmeal in my entire life. But you know what?  Being that old, it's from before the Roundup Ready era. I don't want to waste it, especially with little hope of obtaining any truly organic cornmeal in the future.  So all the cornmeal in the bucket I opened will get repackaged in more manageable quantities in Mylar with oxygen absorbers.

It's a heckuva lot of cornmeal, and we can't eat that much cornbread, so it was time to find other recipes using this bounty of milled grain.  But before I even started searching for recipes, I looked for other uses of cornmeal, especially rancid cornmeal, just in case.  I thought I'd heard of using it for bug bait at the very least.

There honestly wasn't a lot to find.

Ant bait.  Cornmeal alone does not make an adequate ant bait.  Cornmeal alone is called food in ant-speak.  To make bait, mix 1/2 cup of cornmeal with 1 tablespoon of borax.  Stir in enough cooking oil to make a paste.  Put this in a sealed container with entry holes and place it far away from areas with children and pets.  It is toxic if ingested.  If this bait mix doesn't work well enough, add in a little honey or sugar.

Garden fertilizer and weed killer.  Now, this sounded really interesting.  There is this stuff called horticultural grade cornmeal.  Supposedly it has more gluten in it.  Theoretically, when sprinkled on the soil before planting, it helps kill weeds.  When worked into the soil, it makes a nice fertilizer.

Those are the claims.  But one professor at Texas A&M says it's a bunch of bunk, a waste of food and money.  The professors of my agricultural science major daughter also agree.  Expensive compost.  But if my cornmeal went rancid, I think I'd happily throw it in the garden.

Fortunately, the cornmeal isn't rancid, so it was time to search for recipes.  

My friend Renee sent me a recipe for Mexican Spoon Bread Casserole.  Some people call it tamale pie.  The family said it looked like Mexican-style shepherd's pie.  That's what we're trying for dinner tonight.  (And they were all really happy with it.  I thought it was a little bland.)

Mexican Spoon Bread Casserole
Serves 6-8
1 1/2 pounds ground beef (venison is reported to be really good in this)
1 large onion, chopped
1/4 cup chopped green pepper
1 clove garlic
1 can (15 ounces) tomato sauce
1 can (15 ounces) corn, drained
2-3 teaspoons chili powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1 can (2 1/4 ounces) sliced ripe olives

Cornmeal Topping
1 1/2 cups milk (1 1/2 cups water plus 6 tablespoons dry milk powder)
1/2 cup cornmeal
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup shredded cheddar cheese
2 eggs, beaten (or 3-4 tablespoons powdered eggs)

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.  Brown beef, onion, and garlic in a large cast-iron skillet until meat is thoroughly cooked and onion is tender.  Stir in remaining ingredients.  Heat to boiling, reduce heat, and simmer uncovered while preparing the cornmeal topping.

For the cornmeal topping, combine the milk, cornmeal, and salt in a saucepan.  Cook and stir over medium heat just until mixture boils.  Remove from heat and stir in cheese and eggs.

Pour the cornmeal topping over the meat mixture and spread evenly.  Bake, uncovered, for 40 minutes, or until a knife inserted in the topping comes out clean.

Following that success, I figured I'd check online for other recipes.

Southwestern Bean Soup with Cornmeal Dumplings
Serves 4
Soup
1 can (15 ounces) kidney beans, rinsed and drained
1 can (15 ounces) pinto beans or great northern beans, rinsed and drained
1 can (8-10 ounces) chicken, shredded
3 cups water
1 can (14 1/2 ounce) Mexican-style stewed tomatoes
1 can (15 ounces) corn, drained
1/4 cup dehydrated carrots
1/4 cup dehydrated chopped onions
1 can (4 ounces) chopped green chilies
2 tablespoons chicken bouillon granules
1-2 teaspoons chili powder
2 garlic cloves, minced

Dumplings
1/3 cup flour
1/4 cup cornmeal
1 1/2 teaspoons dry milk powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 dash salt
1 dash pepper
1 egg white, beaten
2 tablespoons water
1 tablespoon oil


Combine soup ingredients in a Dutch oven and cook over low heat 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, for the dumplings, combine dry ingredients in a medium bowl.  In a small bowl, combine egg white, water, and oil.  Add to dry mixture and stir with a fork just until combined.

After the soup has cooked at least thirty minutes, drop rounded teaspoonfuls to make 8-9 dumplings on top of the soup.  Cover and cook for 30 minutes.  Do not lift the cover.

Serve with sour cream and shredded cheese. (This was ok.  We aren't really into dumplings here.)  More cornmeal recipes next week.

Links to related posts:
Corn for Long Term Storage
Nixtamalization and Making Masa
Cornbread Just Add Water Mix

For further reading:    
https://extension2.missouri.edu/gh1119    storing cornmeal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_Ready
https://www.hunker.com/13406497/how-to-kill-ants-with-cornmeal
http://gardenprofessors.com/cornmeal-myth-busted/

17 february 2023