Category Archives: Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way

By Lorna Sass

Cornmeal Biscuits

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Currently cooking out of Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way by Lorna Sass.

I’ll never make a good southern gal. I can’t make biscuits to save my life, which is a shame, because they are easy, delicious and make a great side to just about every meal. And with some jam or jelly, they can double as dessert. 

But, alas, my biscuits tend to fall flat. Or tough. Or tasteless. You get the idea, I’m sure. 

My problems with this recipe started as soon as I added the wet (buttermilk and an egg) to the dry ingredients (cornmeal, spelt flour and leavening). According to the recipe, I was to mix the wet and dry, then turn it out onto the counter and knead the dough until it was smooth. Hah! This was no dough; this was muffin batter. There was no way I was going to be able to knead it, because it was just too wet, so I settled for patting it into a circle. I was able to cut out the biscuits with a biscuit cutter and get them transferred to my cookie sheet with only minimal distortion. I plopped them in the oven and waited, not really expecting much.

Well, ten minutes later I had round pucks. They didn’t rise like traditional biscuits, but they didn’t spread out nearly as much as I thought they would. I decided to serve them anyway with the soup I had made (Bryan, bless his heart, will try anything. Once.).

The biscuits weren’t bad, once we split them open and slathered on the butter. They tasted like cornbread (the southern kind, not the sweet, cakey northern kind). I thought they needed more salt, more sugar, more flavor. But adding some jam really helped. To be fair, Sass recommends serving these with sage butter.

I don’t know if I’ll try this recipe again. I’m confused why my dough was so different from Sass’. I don’t think I measured wrong. If I do, though, I’ll increase the salt and sugar maybe add some other herbs. 

Are you wondering why there aren’t any pictures? I’m finding out that photographing grains is hard. Most things just look gray or brown and these biscuits were no different. Sass says they are a pale yellow and her picture shows a tall, pale yellow biscuit. Mine were dingy gray from the spelt flour.

Note: After a little internet research, I discovered Sass’ website which, coincidentally, had the recipe for these biscuits. On her website, she says to add 1/3 cup of buttermilk first, and then add more if needed. The book calls for 1 cup. Armed with that knowledge, I might give these another try this week.

Hominy with Shredded Chicken and Peppers

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Hominy with Shredded Chicken and PeppersCurrently cooking from Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way by Lorna Sass.

I like chicken. I like peppers. I like corn of all kinds, including hominy. I liked this dish. I’m not sure whether or not one would consider this a soup. There was a bit of broth, sure, but it was mostly chunks of chicken, corn and peppers. It was hearty and filling and very, very good.

I started off by boiling two chicken breasts until done. While the chicken was cooking, I cut up the rest of the ingredients. Once the chicken was out, I drained the pot and started cooking the onions and peppers in a bit of olive oil until they softened. The recipe called for one red and one green bell pepper, but I only had red, so I just used two red peppers. I prefer red or yellow bell peppers to green ones anyway. 

The rest of the ingredients were fairly straight forward. A minced jalapeno, cumin, oregano and garlic. They all got thrown in the pot once the onion and peppers were softened. Then I added some small grape tomatoes, the shredded chicken, two cans of yellow hominy (I opted for the shortcut method of using canned, rather then making my own) and a handful of frozen corn. This all cooks together for about 10 minutes and it’s done!

I served the dish topped with avocado. One the side, I made some cornmeal biscuits (also from this book – review coming shortly). The meal was filling and healthy and left us with plenty of leftovers. The only criticism I have is that Sass doesn’t include nutrition information. I consider this book sort of a “healthy” cookbook and part of being healthy includes knowing how many calories are in a dish.

Bulgur and Beef Kibbe

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Currently cooking from Whole Grains, Every Day, Every Way by Lorna Sass.

My first dish out of the next cookbook, “Whole Grains, Every Day Every Way”, by Lorna Sass, did not start off auspiciously: It was too ugly to take pictures of.

After baking my way through “The Art & Soul of Baking”, I wanted to choose a nonbaking cookbook. And since I’m always trying to eat more grains, I figured this was a good way to get me to cook from this book which has been sitting on my shelf for about a year, untouched.

In this recipe, cooked fine bulgur is mixed with lamb, spices and onions and formed into meatballs or loaves. According to Sass, it is a popular dish in the Middle East. Bulgur has been a favorite grain of mine for a long time. I usually use it like rice, as a bed for something else. Since I don’t like lamb, I decided to go with one of the variations and used beef instead. I also used a coarser grind of bulgur instead of the fine bulgur called for, since it was all I could find.

My plan was to form the bulgur/beef mixture into meatballs, brown them in some oil and then finish cooking them in tomato sauce. The recipe started out easily enough. While the bulgur was cooking, I chopped up an onion in the food processor and added spices (cinnamon, allspice, cumin, cayenne and salt). Once the bulgur was finished, it was added to the food processor and the whole shebang was pulsed a few times. You then mix the bulgur and the meat together and shape it. Here’s where my problems started.

The bulgur/meat mixture was very loose and soft. And very brownish gray. I couldn’t get the meat to hold together, so I added an egg as a binder. It seemed to work, until I started frying the meatballs. They pretty much collapsed. By this time, I was starting to worry that we’d be eating cereal for dinner. In an attempt to rescue the meal, I grabbed the rest of the uncooked meatballs, rescued what I could from the frying pan and pressed the whole thing into a 9×13-inch pan and baked it for about 30 minutes (in fact, this is what Sass says she typically does).

I was still determined to incorporate tomato sauce, so once the dish was out of the oven, I cut slabs and covered them with tomato sauce. Although the dish looked like bleeding dirt (with the tomato sauce) and had the texture of loose dirt, it smelled pretty darn good. And it tasted pretty good as well. We both had seconds. I was a little afraid of using cinnamon and allspice in a savory dish, but they worked. You don’t get a big hit of either spice, just a pleasant backnote, balanced nicely by the onion and pepper.

In trying to figure out what went wrong with the recipe, I think it had to do with substituting the coarser bulgur for the fine. In Sass’ notes about bulgur, she notes that fine bulgur triples in size when cooked, whereas coarser bulgur quadruples in size. I didn’t take that into account when I used coarse bulgur, so I believe I ended up with too much grain versus meat.

The dish had a lot of promise and I’ll probably take another stab at it soon. Maybe it’ll even be pretty enough for pictures.