Custard bites

By Perry Washburn

Dilemma: Company coming for dinner. Accomplished cooks, each bringing a dish. Southern food on the menu. I am making "smothered chicken," a Southern-inspired dish that I made up on the fly. Others are bring cheesey grits, collards, black-eyed pea salad, corn bread. But no one has chosen dessert.

I am WHIPPED. Out of time. Bread pudding? No. I have a great original recipe for Buttermilk Praline Pie. Some friends call this "Slice of Heaven." :) But it takes about 3 hours to make.

What to do?

What if I made small custard bites? I love the custard and custard pies my grandmothers' generation used to make. Part of my "Heaven" is essentially a custard layer. And to make them "light" after a heavy meal, I'll make them in my silicone mini-muffin pan.

So, here's what I did, after consulting my custard layer recipe and comparing with an old custard pie recipe in a 1940s cookbook Kath gave to Carolyn recently.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees

3 eggs
1/2 cup brown sugar
dash of salt
2 Tbs of buttermilk powder
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp vanilla
4 oz cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup milk
2 Tbs flour
Pecans
Brown sugar to sprinkle

(I always have buttermilk powder around. It would probably work fine to omit the powder and ad a dash more flour, or substitute real buttermilk for the powder and the milk.)

Beat the eggs, and beat in the remaining ingredients except pecans and remaining brown sugar.
Spray the muffin pan (mine has 24 mini muffins in the sheet). Place a pecan half in each mini muffin cup. Fill 2/3 full with custard; the pecan will float. Sprinkle with a little brown sugar. It will sink, but it's ok.

Bake for 3 minutes at 450. Turn down to 325, and bake a few minutes more, until the custard is puffy and browning. Cool on a rack. I then threw my whole sheet in the fridge for about 2 hours.

After dinner I popped them out of the pan (silicone is great, because you can run a knife easily around the edge). Put them on the plate, act like this is an old family recipe from the Deep South. Yum!

Makes 24.

Cornbread Roxie

By Kathryn Washburn Breighner

I have made this cornbread hundreds of times: the recipe came from Gourmet magazine in January 1984. This would be particularly good with Spring Mill Cornmeal. But I don't have any of that. However, my brothers do...wonder how that happened.

This takes 5 minutes to prepare and 10 minutes to bake. Easy!

1 1/4 c yellow cornmeal
2 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
1/2 t salt
1/4 c flour
1 1/4 c buttermilk
2 eggs, beaten lightly
2 T vegetable oil

Into a bowl, mix together 1 c plus 2 T of the cornmeal with the remaining dry ingredients. Stir in buttermilk and eggs and combine well.

Heat a 10" cast iron skillet over high heat for 1 min. Add oil and sprinkle with remaining 2 T cornmeal, spoon in the batter. Bake at 450 degrees F in the upper 1/3 of the oven for 10 minutes until it is firm in the center and pulls away slightly from the edges of the skillet.

Serve with lots of butter or honey!

How to order gristmill cornmeal from Spring Mill Indiana State Park:
estore.dnr.state.in.us/tek9.asp?pg=products&grp=108