Thursday, October 10, 2013

A BLUE HAWAIIAN HOWDY Y'ALL

 I was thinking about the Russian style cornbread (red cabbage, red onion, black beans) and wondered, "What else might go well with the red cabbage taste, and weird blue dots and rings?" Of course corned beef came to mind, and bacon, and maybe some Swiss cheese. I knew I was on a roll. While gathering ingredients for a Lake-House Black Iron Reuben experiment, I saw the Spam. Ta-Da, a star is born.

 From the beginning the Blue Hawaiian would not be denied. It called to me from the edge of sleep. Heck, it's not like I could sleep with the rowdy cornbread dancing around in my head. Besides, no way I was letting this one get away. After I got up and outlined the recipe, I managed to get to sleep for almost three hours. Then too excited to sleep, I went on to the grocery store for cornbread ammunition.


 There is one baby picture (ingredients), but even though I've made it twice now, I still have no pone portraits to share. The somewhat involved process yielded Blue Hawaiian cornbread in a bunch of styles, German, East German, Russian, and Swiss cheesy (second time around).

Trying out so many different accessory sets made the set-up slow. The basic Blue Hawaiian cornbread included pineapple and spam, red onion, red cabbage, and optional Swiss cheese. In preparation I grated the purple cabbage and the red onion, which I added to the buttermilk to soak and purplize (a technical term). The Swiss cheese and Spam were sliced into 1/4 in square (or smaller) 2 inch long strips. The sliced pineapple was cut small as well, 1/2 inch at it's widest. This is where I should've browned the Spam, but no. I've made the Blue Hawaiian variety twice now and I've only found any Spam in the finished pone once, in the skillet version where I laid the strips on top with the cheese.

  Versions, varieties, styles, the technical lingo of the cornbread science frontier is still quite young. Who knew cornbread could rate such a pedigree? We spun the Blue Hawaiian cornbread a number of different directions. An early favorite was the German, with it's squeezed, short-chopped sauerkraut, and bacon. Personally I liked the Russian variation with it's smaller than a cranberry globs of smashed black beans. Still, I did enjoy the East German treatment, sporting the black beans of the Russian style and unadorned sauerkraut. All these were presented in the Blue Hawaiian style, with spam and pineapple.

  If this seems like a lot of ingredients to stuff into a black iron, corn shaped, pone mold at once, yer right it is. So far I don't think any of them got as done as they could. Don't get me wrong. They're brown top and bottom, but I think if I let them have 5 min. more than the standard 25 min @ 425 f, they'd be better. Still, most of them were gone as soon as they cooled enough to touch.

 The small skillets have yielded some excellent results except when, trying to use up the last of the batter, I put in more than slightly less than an inch of batter. I suspect the cake like tendency was a result of too much  onion juice, nearly 1/4 cup, from my 1/2 of a grated, racket-ball sized, dark red onion. It did seem to take unusually long to cook, but this could just be an oven variation since I was making it at a friend's house. It smelled amazing and looked blueberry. If I'd managed to keep any, I'm sure it would've made great left-over pone.

 Good pictures will have to wait for the sauteed Spam test batch, but I'm afraid that may be Spam's last stand. The kids have shown no love for the Spam and I found it only an "official seeming Hawaiian" pineapple compliment. Actually I doubt the fried Spam test batch will hold a candle to the baconized (Spam free) version.
We'll see, aloha y'all.