I’ve read about making pickles at home before and there tends to be two standard ways of doing it.

The cheat way: Find a bottle of pickles you like. Eat them all and save the jar and pickling liquid. Chop up your cucumbers, dump them in and store for at least a week.

The homemade way: Whip up a batch of your own pickling liquid. Chop up your cucumbers, dump them in and store for at least a week.

As you can tell, neither one is difficult. The homemade method, however, provides you better opportunity to tweak the flavors to your perfection. And of course, it’s always better to know exactly what it is that’s in your food (or pickling liquid).

You probably already have most of the things you need.

The hardest part about this whole process was finding pickling spices. Our local grocery just doesn’t seem to carry it. We ended up going to a nearby spice store and getting a small jar of it for just a few dollars. Beyond that, we already had everything we needed except for the cucumbers themselves.

Of course, the most important part of any pickle is what the pickle will look like. Bread and butter pickles are traditionally small, thin rounds. I’ve done these a few times now and while it doesn’t technically change the taste – everyone knows that pickles with ridge-cuts are just inherently better. I just wish I could figure out why no matter how I use my mandolin slicer, I can never get a straight even cut every time. Most of my pickles have a thick edge and a thin edge. Oh well.

Pickles with ridges > pickles without ridges.

For our pickles, we reuse old pickle jars. The recipe says to use spring-top containers. These work just fine. Dump the cucumbers and the onion into the jar. I usually put the onion on the bottom and then the cucumbers on top. It doesn’t matter though – over time, they’ll all mix together. I also use about half of the onion called for in the recipe. That’s just a rule in our house: half the onion, double the garlic. It’s almost universal. Depending on the size of your jar (we use two different sized ones), you may run out of room for the cucumbers. It’s OK. Just hold on to those ones that don’t fit.

Don't worry if you can't fit them all in right now.

Combine the rest of the ingredients in a pot and bring them all to a boil. This is where I ran into a little “uh-oh” the first time. The recipe calls for pickling spice plus a handful of other spices/ingredients. The pickling spice I used, however, says that you should just combine it directly with the liquid – no other spices needed. In fact, examining the ingredient list (or just looking at the pickling spice) reveals that it already includes most of the additional spices. I decided to just treat the pickling spice as though it didn’t have all those extra ingredients mixed in. Yours may or may not.

Alternately, you could just cheat and use the liquid from storebought pickles. Where's the fun in that?

Once the liquid comes to a boil, you simmer it for a few minutes and then pour it over the cucumbers and onions. At this point, you’re supposed to let the whole jar cool down to room temperature and then top off with any remaining liquid. I almost never have any extra liquid, but I do still sometimes have leftover cucumbers. As the whole jar cools down, you’ll start seeing that the cucumbers start absorbing the liquid and compressing – leaving more room for more cucumbers. Go ahead and throw whatever you have left in. Feel free to use your hand (or a wooden spoon) to just push the cucumbers down if necessary.

Pour the liquid over the cucumbers/onions.

As they cool, the pickles absorb the liquid, leaving room for more cucumbers if you have any left over from before.

It’ll take about an hour and a half for the jar to cool down completely. Throw the cap on, wipe the outside down (you’ve probably spilled some pickling liquid) and put it in the fridge for about a week. Since it takes a week for these to finish and we go through them in about a week, I’ve started just doing two jars of pickles – staggered out by a week or so. By the time one jar is finished being eaten, the other jar is done pickling.

AB’s B&B’sRating: 5 out of 5 stars

This is a great base recipe for bread & butter pickles. The method is easy and active work time is about 20 minutes. We found that the original recipe was a little too sweet and needed more salt. It calls for “a pinch” of kosher salt. I use three or four pinches and they’re perfect for us. Since I’ve started making these, Emily no longer asks for half of my pickle when I get one with a burger at a restaurant. No other pickle compares.

In the end, the price of a buying a jar of pickles versus making one comes out to be pretty much a wash – and it can be difficult for that week while the pickles are pickling, but it’s totally worth it. At least, once you tweak the recipe to your liking. Me? I’m thinking of throwing in some red pepper flakes into the next batch.

After a week, you've got delicious homemade pickles.

I’ve even seen restaurants call their tables “hibachi tables”. It’s not OK.

They mean two totally different things.

They look like and taste pretty close to Cheez-Its

I have a serious addiction to Cheez-Its. I try not to buy them too often as they’re a little expensive when they’re not on sale – and more importantly, they’re pretty bad for you. They’ve got tons of salt and various preservatives. I found a recipe for Cheddar Crackers a while back that purported to be really close to Goldfish crackers. I love those too, so I decided to give it a try.

I’ve experimented with it a few times, and I’m still perfecting the procedure to get them exactly how I like them, but I’ve found that they’re a lot closer to Cheez-Its than Goldfish. I’m OK with that.

I split it into two batches to fit into our food processor

The recipe itself is very simple and requires very few ingredients. When I feel like making a batch, usually the only thing I need to go get is a block of cheese. It requires the following:

• 1 cup flour
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp pepper (optional, but tastes great)
• 4 tbsp cold unsalted butter
• 8 oz grated cheese – a sharp yellow cheddar is a great place to start.

That’s it. Processed cheese already has a fair bit of salt in it, so you don’t need to add a whole lot depending on the cheese you select. The pepper really adds a lot of flavor despite there not being a whole lot.

Our food processor is kind of small, so I make the dough in two batches. All of the amounts divide into two halves very easily (the 3/4 tsp salt breaks into 1/4 tsp + 1/8 tsp).

The first step is to pulse the dry ingredients together until it looks like a coarse meal. Once that’s set, add the butter and pulse again – until it looks like coarse meal. Honestly, half the time I do this, I forget and add the butter in with the flour and seasonings right away. If it makes a difference, I haven’t been able to notice one.

The flour and seasonings pulsed together.

Next add the grated cheese a little at a time and pulse it all together to combine. Eventually, it will form big granule looking bits.

We've finally added cheese to these cheese crackers.

Now, add 1 tbsp of water and pulse. You’re looking for everything to start coming together as a dough. Add additional tablespoons of water if necessary – but only one at a time. I’ve never once needed more than 1 tbsp of water for each of my two batches (so, 2 tbsp of water total).

Once everything comes together, pull out the dough and wrap it in cling wrap. Stash in the fridge for about 20 minutes – chilling it will make it a bit easier to roll out and work with. If you had to split your ingredients into batches like me, you can combine the two dough balls now. I don’t – for a reason.

I find it better to keep everything split into smaller amounts.

Take out the chilled dough ball(s). I now split those into halves – giving me four small balls. I find it much easier to work with the smaller balls.

I split each ball (half of the ingredients) into halves again (now one quarter of the ingredients).

If you’ve got parchment paper, go ahead and put your dough ball on some of that. We’ve been out for a while and keep forgetting to get more.

Flatten one of the balls with your palms and throw on a bit of flour – just a light sprinkling. This is to keep the rolling pin from sticking too much. Roll out the dough to roughly 9 to 10 inches in diameter. On my fancy mat, I notice that I can start seeing through the dough just a bit – enough to see barely make out the dark lines underneath. Ideally, the dough should be between 1/16-1/8″ thick. Thinner means crispier, but too thin means you’ll have a hell of a time getting them off the mat and onto the sheet without tearing later. Get it as uniform as you can, but don’t drive yourself nuts. If you didn’t split your dough balls into smaller amounts, this can be tough. Keep the balls small – it just makes your life easier.

I use a pizza cutter to cut mine into roughly 1″ squares. I’ve also found that docking the dough helps keep them from puffing up as much. I just use a fork and tap each square twice, making 6 tiny holes in each. If you prefer puffy crackers, skip this.

If you used parchment paper, you can bake directly on that. If you want, you can go ahead and put the whole thing on a baking sheet now. As mentioned, I never have any and peel each cracker up one at a time and put it on the baking sheet. It takes longer, but I can make sure each cracker has plenty of room around it by doing it this way. So long as you cut the crackers, you should be OK with just putting the whole un-separated piece in the oven. Feel free to correct me if you’ve tried.

Roll it out to roughly 8-9 inches in diameter or 1/16"-1/8" thick.

Here is where I differ from the original recipe. The recipe calls for baking at 350 for 15-20 minutes (until nicely browned). I’ve tried that and I can just never get the browning and crispness that I want. Baking at 375 for 11 minutes, however, gives me almost exactly what I want. You might try 375 for 10 minutes, check it and throw them back in for 30 seconds or a minute to get them perfect.

When they come out, they should be darker and crispy to the touch. They’ll be pretty hot, so let them cool down a minute or two before you start shoveling them in your mouth.

Next up, I’m going to try putting some hot sauce in – along with some paprika or cayenne pepper.

Baked at 375 for 10 minutes, they went back in for another minute to get them perfect.

I was building a little waterfront house in Minecraft when the sun set. While I was waiting it out, I decided to pop in a couple quick little windows and spotted a creeper heading straight for me. I got the glass in before he exploded, but he just sat there jumping up and down right outside the window.

Hide yo kids, hide yo wife!

Names have been obscured to protect the guilty. You know who you are.

If you’re like me, you use Facebook. A lot. I work from home, so there are some days that it’s the closest thing to real socialization I get to do. Even still, there are things about Facebook which drive me nuts. The newest of these annoyances is the new polls or “Ask Friends” posts that keep showing up in my news feed. “Do you like Coke or Pepsi?” “PC or Mac?” “Should I dye my hair?” “Kelly Kapowski, Jessie Spano or Lisa Turtle?”. If any one of your friends votes in these polls, it gets reposted to their walls, and in turn, your feed. I really just don’t care.

And for the record, there is no question about Coke or Pepsi. Pepsi is nasty. Coke is sweet nectar of the gods.

With many posts, you click on the little X in the top right of the post and it brings up a little menu to hide the single post, hide all posts by that person, or if it’s a post from an application, an option to hide all posts from that application. These new poll posts are labeled at the bottom as being from “Ask Friends”, but the flyout menu does not give you an option to hide all posts from “Ask Friends”. What now?

Salvation comes from a combination of two sources – or more specifically, Firefox plugins. Yup, this means that this particular fix is meant for Firefox users. I believe Chrome has similar abilities as well, but I don’t use it enough to know off hand. Feel free to chime in if you do.

*UPDATED* – now with super short, cut to the chase version instructions. Click here to skip to them, or read on to understand what you’re doing.

The first one is Greasemonkey. This plugin allows you to install and run custom JavaScript files which can do lots of great and magical things to enhance your web experience. You can find lots of great scripts at Userscripts.org.  You can get simple things like scripts to always force YouTube to play the HD versions of videos when you’re viewing them on the YouTube website or to unshrink shortened URLs in webpages. Then there are crazier scripts like ones that automate playing Facebook games for you. The script we want is called FFixer.

FFixer is amazing by itself. Many of the built in functions are small and barely noticeable. Stuff like removing “Facebook” from the title of every page. Others are much more useful, like an option to hide all stories of a single type. Tired of reading about every time your friends change their profile photo or maybe you don’t care about links they share, or you’re just sick of every application, not just Farmville. FFixer has you covered, well, mostly. Check the appropriate boxes and you’re almost there.

Once installd, you'll want to configure FFixer

You can turn it all off, but then, why are you on Facebook to begin with?

Unfortunately, turning off all the applications still doesn’t work to get rid of those pesky Ask Friends polls. Apparently, since it’s a first-party application, it doesn’t count. But all is not lost. We can still get rid of them. It just takes a little bit more work.

At this point, if you want to take the short way, you can click here to skip this next section on Firebug and just go to the part where we come back to FFixer. Using Firebug, however, enables us to find the values we need later in this tutorial and possibly at later dates should there be more we want to hide or block from our Facebook feeds.

We need another Firefox plugin: Firebug. If you’re involved in any sort of web development, you’re probably already familiar with Firebug and already have it installed. If you’re not involved with web development, there are still some really useful features like being able to disable javascript or cookies on the fly. Today, we need to use its ability to Inspect elements.

Once you’ve got it installed, you’ll bring up Firebug by clicking the little bug icon in the bottom right of your browser. Once it opens, you’ll want to click the Inspect tool which looks like an arrow hovering over a box. It’s located in the top left of the Firebug window. With the Inspect tool activated, you can hover your mouse over items on the page. Watch the Firebug window as you do. It displays the HTML that generates whatever it is you’re inspecting. Click on an item on the page and it will lock that item to be inspected.

Click the highlighted icons to open and inspect with Firebug

Scroll through your Facebook news feed and find one of those Ask Friends polls. It’s a little tricky, but you want to inspect the whole story and not just the poll itself. Keep an eye on the Firebug window to help guide you. The  whole item is an “li” element that should start with <li  id=”streamstory… Once you’ve highlighted the whole story, click it and lock in the inspector. In the highlighted code in Firebug, you should find  a block that looks like {“src”:xxx, “sty”:yyy,… where xxx and yyy are number values. We need the yyy value. Write it down.

Use Firebug's Inspect tool to grab the story value for an Ask Friends update. (Hint: it's 338)

You can repeat this process with any other annoying application stories that FFixer can’t seem to get rid of – like Places. Do you really need to know that your friend is at the bar again? Scroll through your feed and find a Places check-in story. Inspect it with firebug and get that STY value again.

Use Firebug's Inspect tool to grab the story value for a Places update. (Hint: it's 285)

OK, all done with Firebug.

Bring up the FFixer configuration menu and head into the Advanced tab. Here, you’ll find a section called “Custom Feed Modification”.  We want to blacklist these applications, so we use a -STY value. The values we found were 338 and 285, so on separate lines, enter -338 and -285. Click the button to “Save Custom Feed Modification” and close the FFixer configuration. Refresh your page and the Places and Ask Friends polls should all be gone. Notice that I say that they should. It turns out that Ask Friends has at least two possible STY values: 285 and 280. Places also has a second value of 278. Go ahead and add -280and -278 to the configuration as well. There may be other values as well, but those two values have done me well so far. In the event I find Ask Friends polls are still sneaking through, I can just use Firebug to find those STY values I need to block.

Now add the negative values to the Custom Feed Modifications of the Advanced Panel in FFixer

So there you have it. It’s not an easy, pretty solution like just clicking those fly out menus in Facebook, but it works. Enjoy your Ask Friends and Places free Facebook experience!

The super short version of the instructions

1. Install Greasemonkey.
2. Install FFixer
3. Under FFixer’s settings, go to Advanced and then add the following values to “Custom Feed Modification”: -338, -278, -285, -280. The first two get rid of Facebook Places. The second two get rid of Ask Friends.

You can optionally install Firebug to dig up any other values you may need to blacklist in FFixer.

*UPDATE*
As of 7/9/2011, this is my blacklisted ID list. I do not have any Ask Friends or Places posts showing up in my feed.

-278
-280
-281
-285
-286
-338

Despite having grown up on Long Island, I don’t think I actually ever had duck until I moved to Florida. Go figure. It’s one of my favorite meats. Every time I eat it, I’m always left amazed at just how different the taste is from chicken. To me, it seems like it would be similar. Maybe it’s just me. It’s OK; it usually is.

It looks like chicken, but it tastes so much better.

When I saw that the book had a recipe for duck, I was really excited to try it. Unfortunately, duck is apparently really hard to come by in Orlando, FL. Our local grocery didn’t have it. I checked one of the places that offers a lot of different meats (they’re not really a true butcher, but close) – they didn’t have it. Not even Whole Foods had it – that really surprised me. I was wondering if I was going to have to break down and go to the Asian district of town. I don’t have a problem going there, but we (and everyone we know) is a little skittish about buying fresh foods there.

Then one day, while walking through the local grocery, I just happened to look down at the pile of frozen chickens and turkeys – and there happened to be a few ducks. I think it must have been because it was the holiday season. Whatever the reason – I snapped it up and threw it into our freezer. It wasn’t until just recently that I’ve had time AND inclination to sit down and make Alton Brown’s Mighty Duck (the book just calls it “Duck”)

The brine is pretty standard: juice, salt, garlic and some seasoning

After a few hours in a brine, the recipe calls for a two stage cooking process. The liquid for the brine is a pineapple/orange juice. I’ve never totally understood why orange is the standard flavoring for duck (the duck I bought even included an orange sauce packet), but it works. First, you steam the duck for 45 minutes. Between the brine and the steaming, you’re left with a mostly cooked and still very moist/juicy duck. Steaming it also means that the excess fat is drained away so it’s not sitting and cooking in its juices.

Everyone loves a good steam bath.

While it steams, you prep a cast iron pan for the searing portion. Moist duck is great – but anyone who has ever eaten duck will tell you that the best part is the skin. Hell, you can keep the meat and just give me the skin and I’d probably be happy. Of course, the skin MUST be crispy. It’s just a rule.

Duck without a crisp skin can't really be called "Duck"

Since I’ve had better luck following the videos/episodes a little closer than the book, I decided to do that here. The book says to put the duck pieces skin side down in the heated skillet and bake for about 15-17 minutes flipping once. The episode and website instruct to cook the legs and thighs first for about 10 minutes, flip them and add the breasts and cook for another 7 minutes.

You need something more than just meat, even if it's duck.

After removing the duck to cool, you use the fat in the skillet to cook some greens to go with the duck. The book calls for chard or kale. Unfortunately, there was no chard available at the grocery, so I went with kale. I hadn’t eaten kale since I was a teenager, and I wasn’t a big fan of it back then. Hopefully, the duck fat would change that. Add the kale and some shallots to the skillet and let it all wilt down – finishing it off with some balsamic vinegar.

So, how did it all turn out?

The duck was delicious. Seriously – if I can find duck again, I’m making this again. I would change one thing though – I’d flip the 7 and 10 minute measurements. The skin on the legs and thighs was perfectly crisp and the meat was cooked perfectly, but the skin on the breasts just wasn’t crispy enough. The breast meat itself was perfect, but the skin just wasn’t quite there. I thought about cooking it longer to crisp the skin further, but I feared overcooking the meat. So, to recap: legs and thighs in, skin side down, cook for 7 minutes; add the breasts skin side down, flip the legs and thighs, cook for 10 minutes.

The kale was better than I expected it to be, but it just didn’t wilt enough for my taste. I suspect chard would work a lot better.

Alton Brown Mighty Duck Rating:Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

This duck is almost perfect. It's more perfect once it's in my belly.

“I paid for dinner last night, you should pay tonight.”
“Yeah, but I bought groceries today.”
“You only bought $20 worth of groceries. I paid $50 for dinner.”

or

“I can’t believe he spent $50 on that. We need that money for new tile.”

Emily and I have been together for 10 years as of this year, and we’ve never had those discussions or arguments. It’s not really anything special. There’s no magic trick. It’s actually an idea I gleamed from one of my ex’s and took to the next step. It was probably the best thing to come out of that relationship, but that’s a story for another day.

It’s very simple. We have joint accounts and personal accounts. My ex was supposed to be moving into an apartment with two other people. They designated a drawer that everyone was supposed to dump rent, grocery and utility money into. Groceries paid out of there were communal and no one was allowed to say “you ate my crackers” if they were bought with that money. Some stuff happened, and those people never really moved in and the idea was never put to the test – but I used it as the basis for our money management when Emily moved in. We were working very different schedules and she did a lot of shopping and errands while I was at work. She needed access to money when I was working, but I still wanted to have money I could play with.

We set up a total of six accounts at the time:

1. Joint Checking
2. Joint Savings
3. Personal Checking (his)
4. Personal Savings (his)
5. Personal Checking (hers)
6. Personal Saving (hers)

With this setup, we established that we have “our money”, “my money” and “your money”.

We then sat down and agreed on who would pay how much of out each paycheck. For the sake of ease, let’s assume that we estimated $1500 for mortgage and various bills like electric, water and insurance. Budget another $500 for groceries, eating out and fun. So we budgeted $2000 per month that needed to go into our joint checking and savings accounts.

At this point, we decided that we would put all of our bill-money into savings (though, this could and probably should be a second checking account to avoid excessive transaction fees). All our joint food/fun money went into the joint checking account. In our case, I made more than Emily, so I put more money into these accounts than she did, but that’s something you would need to decide on yourselves. Whatever is left goes into each person’s personal accounts as they see fit. Of course, the priority is the money that goes into the joint accounts. Money is transferred into there before it goes anywhere else.

Any time we make a purchase for “us” – be it groceries, dinner out or movie tickets – we pay for it out of the joint checking. Money in this account is never spent on personal purchases.

Personal purchases are made from personal accounts – and the other person has no say in what this money is used for. Want to buy a video game or a new camera? Pay for it from your personal account. Of course, depending on your situation, those might be joint-account purchases, that’s entirely up to you. The real point here is that you have “our money” and “my money”.

There are also personal bills to account for. At the time, we had separate car insurance and cell phone bills. School loans, car payments and things like that also needed to be taken into account in the budget. Those are paid out of personal accounts as they are personal bills.

Like any budget, you sometimes go over. Maybe we ate out too often one week and we need a little extra cash. In such an event, we might transfer a little out of the joint savings – or one of us will donate a bit extra out of our personal accounts. There are other times where I’ll just pay out of my pocket just because I feel like treating. But I never pay or pull out of the joint account without first getting approval from Emily or at least mentioning it to her. That way, she’s aware that there may be less money in the account than she thought there was.

Of course, there have been things that Emily has done with her money that I didn’t totally agree with – and I’m sure that I’ve done things with mine that she did not totally agree with – but what she does with her money is her business. What she does with our money is our business.

We have added more joint accounts over the years: an emergency fund, a travel fund and a fund just for household purchases. The mortgage is paid out of the original joint checking and food and entertainment. At this point, we often pay certain joint bills directly out of our personal accounts, but we’ve adjusted our budgets of how much money goes into which accounts accordingly.

Of course, following exactly as we did may not work out for you. You need to adjust for your own situations. Maybe you have a large amount of personal debt and need to funnel most of your money into your personal accounts. Regardless, the real key here is to establish that there are three types of money: “our money”, “my money” and “not my money”. Once you do that, you’ll learn to respect your partner and their financial choices while they respect your apparent need to spend $100 of your money on gummi bears.

I love recipes where you already have everything you need

This particular recipe is nothing like what my mother makes. I’ll have to get her recipe one of these days. She makes a herb encrusted one that is to die for (technically, she makes pernil). This one has a maple/dijon glaze. The recipe really couldn’t be much simpler. Mix together all the ingredients, cover the pork and throw it in the oven. Based on some of the comments, I changed a few things though. First, I switched from cider vinegar to apple cider. A number of people have said that using vinegar seems to cook the pork extra. Second, I added a bit of hot sauce. The comments didn’t really specify how much, so I just kind of added-tasted-added some more. In the end, I probably ended up with about 1/2 tablespoon.

The prep is incredbily simple. Mix sauce. Cover pork. Cook.

One of the most frequent comments was that the cooking time seemed to be off by varying amounts. The recipe said that it should take about an hour. Most people seemed to say that it took closer to two hours. I wasn’t taking any chances, and I used a remote probe thermometer and assumed it would take about two hours. I just kept the remote monitor on my desk while I worked and kept an eye on the temperature. That little gadget is worth every penny of the $20 I spent on it. Roughly every 15-20 minutes, I would pull the pork out and baste it in the juices sitting at the bottom of the pan. In the end, it took about 1 1/2 hours to cook the pork to 150 degrees. At that point, I pulled it out and covered it in foil so it could rest.

It doesn't have the crisp outside I love

Some of the comments said to start the oven at a high temp (450-475) and then drop it. That should create a good crunchy crust. I didn’t do that, but I wish I had. The pork came out very tender and very flavorful. It was moist, but it has a very dry taste. It was moist enough to not need a gravy of any sort, but the taste and flavor is so dry that it really does. With a bit of gravy, slice this stuff up and throw it on an open faced sandwich.

Roast Pork with Maple and Mustard Glaze Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Perfectly for sandwiches

It's basically a muffin mix with creamed corn added

The recipe really couldn’t be much simpler. Some milk, eggs, flour, sugar, baking powder & soda and some creamed corn. Mix it all up, pour it into a cast iron pan and bake for 20 minutes. I’m still not entirely 100% sure what the difference between cornbread and a corn muffin is supposed to be, and making this recipe, it felt like the only real difference between the recipes was the added creamed corn into the batter.

Cooked Until golden and springy

The first time I made this, I cut up a couple pieces and served one to Emily. She commented that it looked and smelled great, but after taking a single bite declared, “I don’t like it”. She had two gripes: the first was the texture – it was gritty. The second was that it wasn’t nearly sweet enough. I read up and learned that old baking powder and soda can sometimes affect the texture of baked goods. I hoped that replacing them with new ones might help enough.

I also decided to up the sugar amount from one tablespoon to three. I have since read that one of the few differences between corn bread and corn muffins is that muffins tend to be a little bit sweeter.

It looks and smells great

Unfortunately, Emily didn’t really like the second cornbread too much either. The sugar helped the sweetness and the texture was a little lighter and fluffier, but there was still a hint of grittiness to it. The recipe called for stone ground cornmeal, but I only had “plain” cornmeal. I’m thinking that a finer cornmeal might help with the gritty texture, but I’m not really crazy about trying the recipe a third time just yet.

Creamed Corn Cornbread Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Cornbread must be served with butter