Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Butternut Corn Pudding


My corn pudding is good, but did not rate a mention here before. This time I incorporated some butternut squash.

It doesn't look like much, but this new twist put it over the top. I left the older recipe almost the same as I invented it, but after roasting two cleaned halves of a butternut squash, and a small onion cut in half, at 350° F. on a baking pan, I put that in the blender too.

I usually start with canned creamed corn, but this time I made my own with two cups frozen corn niblets in two cups of milk, with butter, and simmered that for 45 minutes or so. Then I let it cool a bit before putting that into the blender until I achieved the consistency of normal creamed corn. Then I added 4 heaping TBS. of masa harina, one egg, salt, a tsp. of black pepper, and maybe 2 tsp. of fresh ground cumin. (As with many of my recipes, one can change up: use cream instead of milk, and often two eggs is better than one.) This time around the caramelized onion and the flesh from the roasted butternut squash went in.

Then into a buttered corningware baking dish, sprinkled ground New Mexico peppers on top and sprinkled with a little milk, and into the oven at 350° for an hour. I put the lid on the dish , gave it 15 more minutes at 300°, and it was ready.

What you see on top is the dark roasted chili pepper, not burned pudding! This is a delicious creation I recommend highly. Mmm! My only regret is the New Mexico chilies were not quite hot enough. Some dried red Thai or cayenne powder incorporated into the pudding would serve one well. Next time I make this I will have it down pat. Enjoy!

Friday, May 15, 2009

Disappearing User Power



Lately some of my old trusted abilities are slowly disappearing from my control. I did a "print screen" to capture this Google street scene but when I opened it in my Adobe Photoshop Elements program it didn't let me edit it. I think there's some buggy thing put in on purpose because of copyright. My goal is to defeat it. I think I will search the web for explanation and possible solutions. Right now I'm posting this because I think Google will scrub the metadata off the jpg. Ironic, if so.

Yes, it worked! I opened the photo here viewing the blog (clicked on the photo, opened it full-size in a new window) and saved it. Then I reopened it in Elements and I owned it. Yesssss!

But I don't want to anger Google, my best friends. I found a scrub-warning at a site. So it is indeed ironic that they scrubbed the metadata themselves.

Now, it might just be a bug in Elements, or it could be deliberate - I don't know. I do know some sites write their code to actively prevent saving images from their webpages. I have found most workarounds so far.