Wednesday 30 July 2014

Recipes from the Corn Addict


    Face glistening with butter.  Butter running down your arms.  Your shirt covered in huge dark grease stains from dripping butter (lending you the look of a street person who likes corn) Picking corn out of your teeth for the night.  These are the joys of corn season!  It is my favourite time of the year.  I'm going to be completely honest, as I shared yesterday ... I have a problem.  I could easily just eat fresh corn and new potatoes every single night of the week in the summer.   Did I mention that I am addicted to corn?  


    Normally I am a traditionalist (by traditionalist I am really saying that I am normally pretty childlike and don't like to try new things) when it comes to corn preparation.  I husk it, and throw it in a huge pot of boiling salted water, and come back in 1/2 an hour.  It's easy it's the way it's been done in my family for generations!


  

    This year I have turned a new leaf.  I have been stricken by the barbecue bug.  I'm being a big girl and trying new things!  Yay me!  I'm going to be honest with you.  The only reason that I have fallen in love with barbecue corn is because our friends Bev and Eric invited us over for dinner a few week-ends ago.  Eric cooked the corn on the barbecue.  When you are at someone else's home it is considered bad manners to shout at them "you're cooking your corn wrong!"  I was polite, I pretended to think this was a great way to cook corn.  I even acted like a polite guest and tried the barbecued corn (knowing that I would hate it), and do you know what, I began a love affair with barbecued corn.  The best thing about having a love affair with barbecued corn is that my husband doesn't mind... it's not even considered cheating.  Somehow barbecuing the corn seems to increase the corn's natural sugars.  It's like corn on flavour steroids.  Delicious steroids.
    The correct thing to do when you have learned a new recipe is to make it for everyone and pretend that it's your own personal recipe.  "Oh yeah, it's just a little something I made up."  It's important that people think that you are some kind of a food genius and not just a thief who goes around taking credit for other people's stuff.  Suffusive to say I have now introduced my Dad to this way of cooking corn, and he's hooked.  (I don't know where I could ever get my addictive personality from?)  The best thing about this recipe is how easy it is.  You just soak the corn in a tub of water.  I use my kitchen sink.  Let the corn soak in the water for an hour or so.  Then you just put it right onto the grill husk still on it... how easy is that?  You have to keep an eye on it because the flames do like to like at the husks and try to burn the house down, oh and you should really turn it around a bit with your tongs.
    This way of preparing corn on the cob not only lends itself to the backyard barbecues but would be perfect for roughing it camping.  You could even take the corn up to the campground in a big water jug so that it could be soaking on the trip and be ready to put on an open fire for dinner time!


    My next newest corn on the cob discovery is foil wrapped corn.  I took a square of tin foil, and sprinkled it with a dribble of extra virgin olive oil.  I then sprinkled my other newest obsession, my barbecue rub onto the olive oil http://themiddleagedwomanwholivedinashoe.blogspot.ca/2014/07/the-barbecue-team.html .  I put down my piece of husked corn on the top of my olive oil and rub, and repeated the same process.  Next I tightly folded over the top to the foil and then the sides so that the olive oil would not leak out and cause a huge fire that may well burn off what is left of my eyebrows.  I rolled the corn around on the grill with the tongs so that it would be evenly cooked.  By the way, I should add that I was a success and still have eyebrows!
    This would also work great for camping.  I would wrap up the corn and put them into a ziplock bag to travel.  This could probably even go right into the fire itself.  
    Here is what I really like about this corn recipe.  Although I do LOVE butter, you don't need to add butter to this corn.  The olive oil and the rub are all the flavour you could need.  This would be great for people trying to cut back (like I should be, but like food to much).  Oh and I really did make this one up, unlike the husk on barbecued corn that I stole from Bev and Eric and pretend that I made up.
    So there you have it, two great and simple new ways for you to be a big star at your next back yard barbecue.  Just make sure that you tell everyone that you got the recipe from The middle aged woman who lived in a shoe, and don't do what I would do and pretend that you made it up.. not cool.




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