Corn Adventures and The Simple Life

Months ago, I read an article by Debi Pearl on the No Greater Joy website about different uses for corn. It fascinated me - though we are far from being self-sufficient or old-fashioned in our way of life, anything related to the simple life appeals to me. We would love to become more simple in our way of living, and thanks to the wise advice in the Cumberland Books catalog, we are working on making Baby Steps in that direction.

Anyway... we received our NGJ magazine last week and I was thrilled to see that they had reprinted Corny, Ten Different Ways. I showed it to Jonathan and he thought it looked pretty neat as well.

So last night, the guys come home from work with a 50# bag of Deer Corn (which J had researched and found was the same thing as the feed corn Debi refers to in her article). Woohoo!

Here's what we've done so far:
**We have hominy in the works. We cooked the corn in the ashes last night for quite a while, but it's not quite done, so it's back on the stove this afternoon. I'm going to wait for Jonathan to get home to do anything with it, because he's really enjoyed our experimenting.
**We roasted corn last night to "grind" for corn meal (to use for corn meal mush and corn bread, two things we really like but have never made from meal we ground ourselves).
**We tried "grinding" the roasted corn in the Cuisinart last night, which sent me into the giggles - using the Cuisinart to aid our "old fashioned, simple life" experiments, lol. It was evident that we really do need to be on the lookout for that handgrinder Debi Pearl refers to, but I went ahead and put some of the "ground" corn into the crockpot to cook overnight into corn meal mush. Again, what to me is a humorous blend of old and new.
**The corn meal mush this morning was yummy but rather chunky, due to the incomplete grinding. I also could have used more water in the crock pot. But a successful breakfast, nonetheless.


Here are some of our goals for this year, as regards the simple life:
**Find a hand grinder for corn (this can be used for other grains, too, of course).
**Get our feet wet with Square Foot Gardening. The Blessings are each going to get a few squares, and Jonathan and I will probably have a 3x3.
**Hopefully... Chickens! We need to start small, but we'd really like to have chickens, for eggs especially, but also for meat.

And now it's time for a nap!