What Can I Do With Maize-Meal?

What can I do with maize-meal?  Well, that's a good question!

Dom from Belleau Kitchen challenged us this month to rummage in our kitchen cupboards for a poor forgotten or neglected ingredient and to make something with it.

Well, believe me, I have many items I could have chosen for this challenge.  The one I chose, though, was the bag of maize meal.  A friend had picked it up for me when I had been struggling to get hold of polenta at one point thinking it might do a similar job.  I had managed to find polenta by this time, though, and so the maize meal has languished on my shelf.

I didn't think it would be difficult to find recipes to use it up - my old friend Google always comes up trumps.  And, it did again this time. I got lots of links to South African blogs or recipes and thought I had lots to choose from.  Unfortunately, though, when I started to read the recipes in more detail I kept finding glaring omissions.  Ingredients not listed in the ingredients lists kept popping up in the methods with no information to quantities.  In fact, this seeming mistake seemed to happen so many times from different sources that I am now wondering if recipes are written differently in South Africa.  Can anyone enlighten me?  Am I supposed to have some basic knowledge and assume that if a recipe doesn't list eggs or rising agents or sometimes completely different ingredients, they are there anyway and I should know how much to add?

Anyway, undeterred I thought I would use the titles of the recipes but just make up my own ingredients and methods and so I did.

First up is maize meal porridge.

This was okay and did me my breakfast for a couple of days.  However, I wasn't excited about it and prefer my nice Scottish oat porridge so I won't be making this again.  I decided to add cocoa powder to make a chocolatey version as the maize-meal has a pretty cardboardy taste on its own and I served it with bananas and cold milk.

Here's the recipe to serve 2 with big portions or 4 with small portions.  I recommend small portions!

Ingredients - 

80g maize-meal

1 tbsp cocoa powder

1 tbsp light brown muscovado

2 tsp cinnamon

650mls water

pinch salt

Method - 

Pop all the ingredients into a large saucepan, mix well.  Simmer, stirring occasionally for about 20 minutes.

As an aside to this post, I can recommend a tastier porridge.  While making Dan Lepard's Rye Apple cake, I kept eating the uncooked batter and thinking it was like a lovely spiced rye porridge so I decided to look and see if there were any recipes for porridge made with rye flour. I found this recipe for whipped berry rye porridge from Scandi Foodie.  It was lovely and obviously very healthy. 

So, moving on from breakfast to a main meal, I decided my next project would be for maize-meal pancakes.  This is based on recipes I found for fried maize-meal bread which seems to be served as an accompaniment to stews.  We were having Tinned Tomatoes' Jacqueline's braised lentils for tea and these actually went very well with it. The lentils dish was lovely - very comforting and satisfying - I recommend it and will be having it again. Another great way to get loads of fibre into the kids.  We also had some leftover meatballs so we served those alongside - sorry Jacqueline. 

Here's the recipe for the pancakes - 

Ingredients - 

120g maize-meal

120g plain flour (or what I did was 60g plain and 60g spelt flour just to keep the fibre levels up a bit more)

1 tsp baking powder

pinch of salt

2 eggs, beaten

250ml milk

2tsp oil

Method - 

Beat together all the ingredients. Grease a frying pan with a little oil and heat over a moderate heat.  Drop tablespoons of batter onto the pan when hot.  Fry for about 1 minute or until bubbles form on the surface then flip over and fry the other side.  Serve warm with a comforting stew.

And now onto my final maize-meal recipe for pudding.  These are wee chocolate puddings and are inspired by a recipe from Shona's Kitchen - a blog with lots of South African recipes. They have a prune in the middle of each cake which gave me a bit of a double whammy as it used up a tin of prunes I found in the cupboard too.  And prunes are good for fibre - am I preaching too much? I served these with custard but I appear to have forgotten to photograph them when served so here they are still in the tin.

My recipe here - 

Ingredients - 

230g maize-meal 

1 tsp baking powder

2 tsp cinnamon

115g caster sugar

2 tbsp cocoa powder

1tsp vanilla extract

500ml single cream

250ml milk

12 prunes

Method - 

1. Preheat oven to 180C.

2. Mix together all the ingredients except prunes and combine well.

3. Pour mixture into 12 muffin cases.

4. Add a prune to each one.

5. Bake for 30 mins until set.

6. Serve hot with custard. 

And yes, I finished the whole bag of maize-meal with these three recipes. I am unlikely to buy it again but if I ever find myself with some, I'm going to go with the pancakes as my favourite way of using it up.  I would be fascinated to hear if anyone else has any maize-meal recipes - please let me know in the comments.

Breakfast Idea Number 2 - Porridge.

It has to be porridge when, to get to work, you have to carry all your stuff up the track wading through thigh deep snow then spend half an hour digging before you can get the car going.  Or, you are at home with the kids and you have to drag the two of them up the hill on their sledge several times.  They just don't understand that Mummy feels old!

Obviously you can do anything you like with porridge.  These are what I have had in the last few days.

Sprinkled with demerara sugar.  The sugar melds together in the moisture to give a lovely caramelised topping.

Chopped apple, sultanas and cinnamon. Mmmm.

Honey and almond.

Banana and chocolate.

Although, my favourite is just plain simple porridge made with honey and salt - the way my Granda used to make it.  Although I very rarely make it properly anymore - a quick blast in the microwave is much more convenient.

Here's another picture of the kids out on the sledge.  Yes the one that the above porridges have fuelled.  Can't wait til they are old enough to pull their poor old mother on the sledge!

Salted Oat Crackers.

Well, I can take no credit for these whatsoever.  I came in from rowing yesterday and found Steve and the boys making something.  So I just decided to photograph them and see what treat lay in store.

They were making salted oat crackers from a recipe in the Weekend section of this Saturday's Guardian.

Recipe - 

Ingredients - 

300g plain flour, plus a little extra for rolling

1tsp caster sugar

1/2 tsp baking powder

3/4 tsp fine salt

25g unsalted butter, softened

100g rolled oats

175ml cold water

sea salt flakes, for sprinkling

Method - 

1. Put the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a large bowl and rub in the butter.

2. Toss in the oats and milk, and mix to a soft dough.  

3. Cover the dough in the bowl, and set aside for half an hour.

4. Heat the oven to 200C (180C fan)/390F/GM 6.

5. Liberally flour a worktop and roll out the dough very, very thinly, using extra flour to stop it sticking.

6. Cut the dough into 10cm discs using a pastry cutter, or into squares with a sharp knife.

7. Lay the discs (or squares) on an oven tray lined with nonstick baking paper.  Brush the top of each disc lightly with water then sprinkle a few salt flakes over each.

8. Bake for about 12-14 minutes, until barely golden at the edges, but still slightly pale.

We had them warm out of the oven.  They weren't as thin and crisp as they could have been - really because if they had been too thin it would have been too difficult for the boys to handle the dough.  They were delicious, though.  Tasted just like the porridge my Granda used to make.  So, in honour of that, I had mine drizzled with honey as we always had our porridge with honey and salt - love the contrast.  Yum.  The boys enjoyed theirs with honey like me and Steve had his with cheese.  We will definitely make these again - probably make these to go with the cheese when we have people over for dinner.

Actually, it's probably about time we had a go at making our own oatcakes too.