Last weekend when I made the black bean chili, I made a cornbread to go with it. Except instead of regular cornmeal, I used Maseca flour.

The only cornmeal I’ve been able to find here is instant polenta. Actually, I found a box of cornmeal once, in a hole-in-the-wall shop, but I didn’t buy it (silly me) and I’ve never seen it anywhere else since.

The instant polenta works fine as cornmeal. The resulting cornbread is a little heavier than normal (I prefer my home-ground yellow popcorn), but still yummy.

The cornbread made with maseca, however, was completely different. There was none of the coarse grittiness that comes with cornbread. It was soft and tender. It was like cake, but with a corn tortilla-y flavor. We loved it.

(I still love my cornmeal cornbread, but after reading this post, I do wonder if maseca cornbread might have some nutritive benefits.)

Of course, considering that the K’ekchi’ love anything and everything related to corn, I taught the girls how to make it. We made only six double recipes and sold it all, much to the disappointment of those who didn’t jump-jump into the buying and eating frenzy.

Maseca Cornbread
Adapted from my standard recipe.

Updated: The results of more experimentation (no white flour and nearly all maseca and then some whole wheat, maseca, a bit of cornmeal, etc) were all a success!

1 cup maseca flour
1 cup white flour
1/3 cup sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoons salt
1 egg, beaten
1 1/4 cups milk
1/4 cup oil

Mix dry ingredients. Whisk in wet. Pour batter into a greased 9×9-inch baking dish and bake at 350 degrees until an inserted toothpick comes out clean. Serve warm. Pass the butter and honey.

Ps. All photos, except for the one of the flours, are from the baking day at Bezaleel.

This is pretty much exactly what I feel like right now.

After a morning of more-intense-than-normal Spanish, my brain is fried, sizzled, zapped. I have a pile of emails to write and documents to create, not to mention what feels like 26 blog posts almost boiling over on the back burner of my mind.

I like The Busy, make no mistake, but I can only sit in front of a computer screen and tap out words for so long before my eyes cross and my shoulders seize up. So forgive my lack of blog inspiration.

Or lack of discipline required to force myself to write out the blog inspiration.

Or just my plain old shortcomings in general.

Whatever.

I gotta go make pizza.

Ps. I’ll probably be back tomorrow with some sort of verbage for you to muddle through, but for right now I’ll pretend that I’m one of those bloggers that considers her blog a job and therefore actually doesn’t blog over the weekend because those are her days off. I don’t know what “days off” are, though if my life continues to careen along at the rate it went today, I may need to figure that one out.

On Saturday I made soup.

I was going to tell you about it on Sunday, but I got distracted by church. On Monday I got distracted by the quotidian. And then Tuesday I got distracted by all things lack tay shun. So now it’s Wednesday and even though I’m tempted to get distracted by my mile-long list of things I want to unload here, I am going to buckle down and force myself to write about Saturday Soup.

It was good, that soup was. Even my husband, aka Mr. No Compliments, took one bite and let loose with a loud, “This is good.”

“Of course it is,” I said, my indignation at his surprise—as though the chances of me turning out a tasty soup are slim, thanks a lot, you ungrateful wretch—tempered by a mouthful of riotous flavor fireworks.

The soup is simply a meatless black bean chili bulked up with carrots and sweet potatoes and with a handful of weeds thrown in for flair.

See, while I was a-soup making, the neighbor stopped by and we got to talking about the market produce I can’t identify. She attempted to match names with descriptions, but I remained clueless, so she took a hike around the property and returned with a handful of green, the roots still clumped with dirt.

I tore off the leaves of the purported good-in-soup plants, washed them well, and chopped them into the soup. There wasn’t much of a flavor difference—I had already added a whole pile of fresh cilantro—but the green added good vitamins and (more) pretty green fleckies.

If you have edible weeds in your yard, mince a nice handful up real fine and toss them into the pot. If nothing else, it’s fun to put weeds in soup.

Black Bean and Sweet Potato Chili

1 onion, minced
2 large carrots, peeled, quartered lengthwise, and chopped
1 large sweet potato, peeled and diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons canola oil
3-5 teaspoons chili powder
1 teaspoon cumin
1 quart chicken broth
4 cups cooked black beans, drained
½ cup chopped fresh cilantro
weeds, optional
salt and pepper

Put the onion, chopped carrots, sweet potato, garlic, and oil in a large soup pot. Cook over medium high head until mostly tender, 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Do not brown. Add the chili powder and cumin and stir to combine.

Add the broth and beans and cook until heated through and the flavors have had time to get acquainted, about 10 minutes. Stir in the cilantro and weeds. Taste to correct seasonings and serve. Feel free to condimentize, but we did not.