Corn Meal Recipes

A new crop of simple recipes

Do you need help with that nagging question of "what's for dinner?"

You'll find plenty of options with upscale, contemporary and international flavors in "Radically Simple: Brilliant Flavors With Breathtaking Ease," by Rozanne Gold (Rodale Books; $35) and "Real Simple Dinner Tonight: Done! 189 Quick and Delicious Recipes," edited by Allie Lewis Clapp and Lygeia Grace (Time Home Entertainment Inc.; $24.95).

"My goal is to ramp up the ease of preparing great food every day," says Gold, a former chef who adds that "the best food in the world is often the simplest." She shares 325 recipe ideas with a bit of "chef thinking" in each. "Radically simple food and real cooking are, in fact, soul mates."

Clapp, Real Simple's food director and the mother of a 2-year-old, concurs.

"Cooking from scratch does not need to take a long time or be difficult," she says. The book's recipes, culled from columns in the magazine, "are meant for real people cooking real dinners every night of the week."

"This is my style of cooking and the life of so many people," Clapp says. "If you care about the health of your family, it takes only a little longer to prepare a home-cooked meal than to pick up takeout."

The majority of the Real Simple recipes, each accompanied with a color photo, are "easy enough for novices but interesting enough for experienced cooks and take 30 minutes or less total time," Clapp says. "We try to keep ingredient lists short, and the recipes are written to include a main dish and side dish together." Nutritional information for each recipe is listed in the back of the book.

Clapp's all-time favorite is the Roasted Chicken with Grape Tomatoes and Kalamata Olives. She also is partial to the Frozen Peanut Butter Cup and Pretzel Terrine and the Caramel-Almond Ice Cream Torte, both of which use vanilla ice cream as a base.

Gold's latest cookbook is her 12th. She is the author of nine books in the 1-2-3 series that explored cooking with only three ingredients per recipe as a way to get people back into the kitchen.

Now, she says, "I've grown and changed and so has my cooking."

Even so, about two-thirds of her latest recipes can be on the table in a half-hour or less. For a quick dinner, try smoked and fresh salmon en chemise -- wrapping fresh salmon fillets in thinly sliced smoked salmon and baking at a high temperature a short time. A room-temperature sauce of tomatillos, basil, cilantro, onion and lime accompanies the dish.

Gluten-Free Lemon Cornmeal Cookies « Whole Foods • Healthy Recipes ...

For the last week or so, I have been a little obsessed with the idea of making a cornmeal-based cookie. I love the rustic texture and deep flavor of cornmeal, and I figured it would really shine in cookie form.

Doing an internet search for cornmeal cookies yielded some interesting results — it appears that the Italians came up with this idea long before I did! Their cornmeal cookies are called zaletti , and they are made with polenta, which is usually sold in a coarser grind than American-style cornmeal.

In this recipe I went with a medium grind cornmeal made by Bob’s Red Mill, which produced cookies with noticeable, chewy flecks of corn. You could certainly use more finely-ground cornmeal if you were looking for a more refined texture, but I have to admit I like how these turned out. A little extra chew never hurt anybody.

Just like my banana bread, these cookies were noticeably improved the next day. I’m thinking that, with gluten-free baking, this may often be the case. A 24-hour stint in an air-tight container allowed the moisture from the cookies to penetrate the cornmeal flecks, transforming them from gritty to chewy.

While there are quite a few recipes for cornmeal cookies on the internet, I did not find a single one that was gluten-free. No matter. What I needed was a recipe — any recipe — that gave weight measurements. This way, I could convert the flour to a gluten-free mixture with no fear of altering the dry-to-liquid proportions. I turned to one of my most trusted sources for baking, the inimitable David Liebovitz . A former desciple of Alice Waters, this Chez Panisse-trained, countless-award-winning pastry chef now lives in Paris, maintaining his beautiful blog and writing gorgeous recipe books.

I forged ahead with David’s recipe in hand, knowing I could use it as a reliable starting point. As per Shauna Ahern’s recommendation , I substituted a 70%/30% blend of flour and starch for the wheat flour, using sorghum and tapioca . I also added my own touch to these cookies, zesting an entire lemon into the batter. They have a pleasantly mellow lemony aroma and taste, the perfect treat to pair with an afternoon cup of lemon-spiked Earl Grey.

The first time out, I made these cookies from walnut-sized lumps of dough, resulting in two dozen cookies about 2 1/2 inches in diameter. They were just fine this way, but rolling out more than twice as many smaller dough balls makes for much daintier, cuter treats. They’re also more fun to eat in one or two bites, and less likely to crumble everywhere — the lack of gluten makes for a less cohesive, more delicate cookie. If you’re bringing them somewhere, transport with care to avoid the unfortunate unveiling of a box of sandy cookie crumbs!

Corn meal recipes, compiled from the pages of the Ohio cultivator, 1848

Fifty valuable and delicious recipes made with corn meal ...

Enriched corn meal recipes

Low cost recipes

Good housekeeping's book of recipes and household discoveries, every recipe actually tested and approved