We haven't made it very far in our Savannah road trip posts, but this was a side of stewed tomatoes and okra we got on our trip
Next, I picked up Sweet Home Cafe Cookbook: A Celebration of African American Cooking, the book put out by the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I learned so much from that book that reading it almost felt like a visit to a museum with curated exhibits about food. It was so hard to choose recipes from the book to make since so many things sounded good, but in the end, I decided to make some hot water corn bread with stewed tomatoes and okra, and maybe also some stewed black eyed peas.
Who knew frozen okra was so hard to obtain? I had it in our carts on both Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh, and over the course of a week, they went from available (but other stuff we needed wasn't at the time, so we waited) to completely gone. They didn't return by the time we ordered the groceries (and are still out of stock as of the time of this writing), and Trader Joe's has never carried okra (that I know of), so I had to change plans.
I had heard people rave about the mac and cheese at the museum's cafe (what the book was based on), so I decided to make that instead. To balance out the meal, I wanted to make some vegetables too, but considering there was no okra (or black eyed peas) to order online, I had to search elsewhere. If we couldn't make okra, green beans were my next vegetable of choice, and a search for "soul food green beans" led me to a recipe for exactly that from Divas Can Cook. Perfect plan B.
The night before I was going to make our soul food meal, I was writing out my cooking plan, and realized that the mac and cheese required not only 1 cup of whole milk but 3 cups of half-and-half. I had been planning to make a substitute for half-and-half using milk and butter, but that would have required nearly 4 cups of milk total, and that milk should really be for B, not dinner. (I also wasn't sure we even had 4 cups of milk left in the carton.) Not only that, but it required mustard, and the only mustard we had was one that we're not sure if B can tolerate, so there went plan B.
I looked through Sweet Home Cafe some more to find something else I could make with what I had at home, and I found myself right back where I started among the corn bread and johnnycakes. Finally, our meal was set - johnnycakes (aka hoecakes) plus green beans, with some easy BBQ chicken on the side (just chicken with store-bought BBQ sauce like from the black and white challenge, really not worth mentioning again other than to figure out the total cost of dinner). It may have taken a long road to get there, but I was happy with our end result.
Johnnycakes
I actually made the johnnycakes second, but since I've spent most of this post talking about Sweet Home Cafe, I'm going to start there. I pretty much followed the recipe from the book except that they used white cornmeal and all we had (and all the stores had) was yellow cornmeal. I also skipped the butter and syrup for serving, since we were eating them with chicken and green beans.
The ingredients for our johnnycakes were:
- 2 cups cornmeal ($2)
- 1 tsp salt ($0.02)
- about 1/4 tsp baking powder (didn't have a 1/4 tsp to measure exactly) ($0.05)
- 1/2 tsp sugar ($0.06)
- about 1.25 cups water ($0)
- 1 cup whole milk ($0.38)
- butter for greasing the skillet ($0.18)
Coming in at approximately $2.69 (or possibly less, since I can't remember where the cornmeal came from or how much it was exactly), the johnnycakes were filling and affordable. Definitely a good budget meal.
The steps for making the johnnycakes were:
1. Combine the cornmeal, salt, baking powder, and sugar in a medium bowl, and mix well.
2. Heat 1 cup of water and 1 cup of milk over medium heat until simmering.
3. Remove from heat, and add the cornmeal mixture, stirring until the batter is smooth. [This is where I ran into a problem. I added the cornmeal mixture. I stirred it around. There wasn't enough liquid, and all I had were clumps. There was no smooth batter, and there was no more liquid to make it smoother. I added hot water, a little bit at a time, probably somewhere between 1/4-1/3 cup in the end, until I had a somewhat smooth batter. I expected it to be thinner like pancake batter, but having never made this before, I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be that thick.]
4. Melt a little butter in a skillet over medium heat. Spoon the batter onto the hot skillet without crowding the pan, and cook for a few minutes per side (turn once). [I used a 1/3 cup measuring cup to scoop out the hot batter, but no idea if that was right since they said to form cakes about 3 inches.]
5. Move the cooked cakes to a plate and keep warm. Add some more butter to the pan to grease, make the cakes again, and repeat as much as needed.
Not being an experienced pancake maker (that's more of an A thing, and I think the only ones I've posted about here are zucchini pancakes and carrot pancakes, which are completely different), I didn't realize that their instruction to form cakes probably involved a little bit of flattening them down as well. As a result, all of our cakes, except the last one that A made since I couldn't see the bottom of the pot with the batter to scrape it clean, were thick and dense. They tasted good, but could have used some work on the texture. I'm not sure if the batter was supposed to be so dense either or if there was something I did wrong, so I'll have to look into that some more too.
Green Beans
We love green beans in this household, but I usually use canned because they're faster to cook and easier to eat for B. For these stewed green beans, I decided to go with frozen whole green beans instead, since they were more economical and would last longer than fresh (and we didn't know how long until we were making this meal since it was pretty much a pantry meal). I mostly used the original recipe as a guide, because we made quite a few modifications to fit the groceries we could get. Among other things, I omitted the red pepper flakes, added a red bell pepper (for color, a little accent, and because we had one), and substituted bacon for the smoked turkey leg, because I'm not even sure where I would get one of those here.
The ingredients for our green beans were:
- 1 bag of frozen whole green beans ($2.29)
- 1 strip of bacon, chopped ($0.45)
- 1 tbsp of butter ($0.09)
- 1 onion, chopped ($0.79)
- about 1/4 cup of garlic, finely chopped ($0.33)
- 1 red pepper, sliced ($0.99)
- 1 cup of chicken broth ($0.50)
The green beans cost approximately $5.44, and when combined with the johnnycakes and the chicken, the total for dinner was about $9.33. I love when we can do dinner for 3 under $10.
The cooking time for this recipe is long, but there isn't too much active time. The steps for making the green beans were:
1. Prep - chop bacon, chop onion, chop garlic, slice red pepper, take green beans out of freezer to thaw a little while prepping.
2. In a large, deep skillet, add the bacon to a cold pan over medium heat and let the fat render. Once the bacon is mostly cooked, add the butter and melt the butter.
3. Add the onion, and cook until softened.
4. Add the garlic, and cook for another minute or so, and then add the red peppers.
5. Cook for a few minutes, and then add the chicken broth.
6. Add the green beans, and mix everything well.
7. Cover and simmer (low and slow) for about an hour, stirring once or twice.
The last step is supposed to be to taste, and to add salt and pepper if needed, but it was late and I forgot about that. In hindsight, I would have added a little black pepper at the end.
We loved these green beans, and would absolutely make them again. Although I'm sure the smoked turkey leg would have given it more depth of flavor, I liked how it turned out with the bacon, and bacon is far easier to get here than some of the other meats I often see in soul food recipes, like turkey legs and ham hocks. The red pepper was a good addition (and actually B's favorite part). Really glad to have found this recipe so we can add another delicious vegetable recipe to our rotation.
In the end, our soul food exploration was fun and delicious. We didn't end up making this until weeks after the scheduled challenge (good thing I'm not officially participating), and the actual dinner ended up being a last-minute change of plans, but it worked out well!
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