Comfort food

After admiring Smitten Kitchen's Mushroom Bourguignon for months and months, it suddenly hit me this afternoon that I had to make it tonight. The thought of it was making my mouth water at 3:30 this afternoon.

So, yeah. I picked up some mushrooms on the way home. I bought big cremini, but I think it would have been good with any meaty mushrooms.

Oh, and because we're not vegetarian and we had two sad week-old slices of (English) bacon in the fridge, we used bacon right at the beginning. It was AMAZING and so much quicker than the full boeuf version and I could hear Julia admonishing me NOT to crowd the mushrooms! (Darling, I didn't. I did them in 2 batches. You'd be proud of me.)

SO good that we ate it all and there were no pictures.

Oh, and we put the pearl onions and butter/flour mixture in right after adding the liquid. Other than that, unchanged. And delicious.

Veggie peeps: go make it.

Meat-eating peeps: this is almost boeuf bourguignon and it was on the table in an hour. SHUT UP and go make it.

And as the other part of my quest for comfort food, I made the pumpkin-apple muffins from the Libby's Pumpkin tin on Thursday last week (Thanksgiving, for those of you paying attention). I wanted cream cheese icing, not streusel, so that's what I did.

Libby's recipe is on the inside of the pumpkin labels, and also here. I used Martha's cream cheese frosting recipe, here. YUM.

Recipe: Martha Stewart's Cornbread

I was planning black bean chilli for supper tonight, and decided that I really wanted some cornbread to go with it. I was informed by my boys that they Do Not Like cornbread. Fair enough - more for me!

I searched around for a few minutes (none of my cookbooks had a recipe - zoinks!), and decided that I'd see what Martha Stewart had to say about it. Oh, look, a super-duper Martha cornbread recipe. Thanks, Martha!

Ingredients

Makes 1 eight-inch square loaf [I used a rectangular pan because I didn't have a square one]

• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 cup yellow cornmeal
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 cup milk
• 2 large eggs

Directions

1. Heat oven to 425 degrees [or 200 C] with rack in center. Butter an 8-inch-square baking pan [or a 6 x 12 pan], and set aside.
2. In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, cornmeal, sugar, salt, and baking powder. In a small bowl, whisk together milk and eggs until frothy. Pour the milk-and-egg mixture into the dry ingredients. Mix until the ingredients are just incorporated. Do not overmix; the batter should be lumpy. Pour the batter into prepared pan. Cook until top is golden brown and a cake tester inserted in the center comes out dry, 20 to 25 minutes.

From Martha Stewart Living, November 1999

So here are the dry ingredients, all piled in:

And the batter in the pan (yum!):

And my golden crispy cornbread with the veggie chilli and the rice (for the non-cornbread-eating boys):

Good thing you can freeze cornbread (it was delicious but there's only one of me)! To their credit, they did both give it a try. Pronounced it "too American."