Fun with blue cornmeal

The Navajos should object.

Over the past week I've discovered some ways to use up a bag of New Mexican blue cornmeal, most of them bad.

To start with, you can use your blue cornmeal to make the unappealing triple corn Navajo muffins from Blue Corn and Chocolate by Elisabeth Rozin. These squat, super-sweet muffins call for yellow cornmeal, blue cornmeal, and canned creamed corn. Why all three? I'm guessing because "triple corn muffins" sounds sexier than "corn muffins." But sexy these jaundiced midget muffins were not. I imagined I could detect the mucilaginous creamed corn in every bite. So yucky.

A very slightly better use of your blue cornmeal would be to whip up a batch of the blue corn pancakes from Culinaria: The United States.

I don't know what Owen was doing with his hand -- some kind of wizard move to make the leaden pancakes go away?

Thick, stiff, heavy, and gray, drenched in maple syrup these pancakes weren't inedible.

Another alternative: the worst chocolate chip cookies in the world!

Mark: "These are going to be around for a while." 

Crumbly, sandy, cakey, gritty, and sickly looking, the blue cornmeal chocolate chip cookies were baked from a Bob's Red Mill recipe. Thanks, Bob, for keeping things real. There are so many recipes for amazing chocolate chip cookies out there these days, I'd forgotten it was possible to make bad ones.

After three bummer dishes, I gave up on recipes calling specifically for blue cornmeal. I used the last of the blue cornmeal in these lovely and inspired pancakes  from the Essential New York Times Cookbook. 

To make these pancakes -- formally known as Kathleen Claiborne's hot cakes -- you cook your cornmeal (blue or yellow) into a sort of mush and then mix it into an airy batter and fry. What you end up with are beautiful, crusty pancakes with a soft, cornmeal mush center. Mark raved about them. Owen didn't rave -- complimenting me is against his principles -- but requested seconds. All the pancakes were eaten before I thought to take a picture.

And with that delicious breakfast, the blue cornmeal was gone.

I'm not sure how much longer I can continue this little pantry-cleaning series, because it's not turning out to be as inspiring and rewarding as I'd hoped. I'll give it a few more weeks. At the very least need to tackle the dessert wine.