During the growing season I’m generally too busy planting, tending, and processing to fool around much with ingredients from elsewhere. In winter, there’s more leeway. I’m giving myself more personal leeway with food choices, too: I no longer stick to strict keto. So there’s lots of room for play.
Posole, a stew based on hominy corn, is a traditional Christmas dish in my area, but is usually based on canned hominy to get around the lengthy and tedious nixtamalization and cooking involved. But I was ordering beans from Rancho Gordo, was curious about their heirloom blue hominy corn, and decided to try it. “Hominy corn” means that the nixtamalizing, soaking the corn in a calcium hydroxide solution and rubbing the outer carp off, is finished. I soaked 12 ounces of the kernels in cold water to cover overnight, then put the corn and soaking water in my Instant Pot, added enough water to stand 1” above the kernels, added salt, and cooked under pressure for 30 minutes.
When I was able to open the pot and taste, the result surprised me. Although the only ingredients were the corn, water, and salt, the broth tasted so rich and meaty that I sipped a cup of it as I worked. Many kernels looked whole and I thought I had undercooked them, but when tasted they were perfect, with chewy-but-tender consistency. I could happily have eaten them plain, but I set out elaborating.
I kept it easy and quick. After all, the whole point of doing some cooking ahead is to have a quick good meal when you need one. I sliced a large onion and sautéed it slowly in a few tablespoons of bacon fat until golden throughout, then added a generous quarter cup of the colorado seasoning paste that I wrote about recently and about a cup of canned fire-roasted tomatoes. The corn and its cooking liquid were added and the whole pot simmered for 20 minutes. Then it was time to dish out in cheery red bowls.
I added a generous handful of grated mild cheddar on top of each bowl as shown at the top of this post, but I have to add that it was extremely good without the cheese, and by using oil instead of bacon fat to sauté the onion and water instead of broth in the seasoning paste, you could have a vegan dish that would pass muster with the meat-eaters at the table.
My urban homestead 