Clik here to view.
____________________________________________________________
Even I must admit that I may have gone overboard with the corn. After the ride to the shore, once we had unloaded the back seat filled with all of my farm market stands, and pretended to unpack the luggage, and said hello to all the family, and snuck off for a first stroll to the beach to see the ocean and feel the sand between our toes, the discussion came up about Sunday morning and did anyone have any plans. And while the question may have originally been meant to determine who was going to Mass and when that might happen, I had a pilgrimage of my own to plan — the Farmers Market. And since I am a grown woman without a valid driver’s license and all of my time spent in Amsterdam be damned, absolutely no ability to ride a bike while toting groceries, I was going to have to negotiate to get someone to drive me.
And I know you may be saying, much like my family was at that very moment, why, oh why, do you need to go to the farmer’s market tomorrow when we just got here and have yet to even take a bite out of what you already brought. But you see there is only ONE farmer’s market a week on this barrier island upon which we summer. And it is on Sunday morning. It is written. You have your places of worship, I have mine.
In the end it took no arm twisting, and my sister and I set out to Stone Harbor bright and early in the morning. We did a quick lap around to see what we could see — it’s a tiny, but lovely market, in the parking lot under the water tower — and then set to buying. We bought fresh made guacamole from the cute surfer boys who you could tell were working hard to refrain from calling us ma’am. Fruit studded coffee cake from the lovely baker. Sweet, briny scallops from the fish monger. And my last stop was for corn. 12 ears of corn for $3. Which seemed like quite the bargain. And not like a lot at all. I mean, who doesn’t love grilled corn on the cob in the summer? A few ears were going to be set aside to experiment with a vegan coconut creamed corn recipe. To be honest, I was fairly certain that we were going to have to make a mid-week corn restocking run. But that’s not the way it turned out.
I left the corn in the downstairs kitchen. Yes that’s right, our beach house had a small kitchen on the ground floor, and a full kitchen on the third floor. Craziness, right? My idea was to leave the corn downstairs, and then I would shuck it sitting on the back steps, sipping a beer, before tossing it on the grill to get hot and caramelized. But I am not used to having multiple cooking spaces. At home I can nearly touch my stove from my sofa and my freezer is more slender than a shoebox. I forgot about the corn that night. I forgot about it the following night as well. Each morning I would get very excited to see the corn as I passed through the downstairs kitchen on my way to the beach. And each night as I made dinner in the upstairs kitchen I would completely forget about it. Out of sight, out of mind. Three days later the corn was finally shucked and cooked, and only about 5 ears were eaten. No worries, I said as I sliced the kernels off the remaining cobs, filling up a ziploc baggie the size of a bed pillow. We can have creamed corn tomorrow. We can throw corn into salads. “We can make CORN FRITTERS” my sister and I exclaimed at once.
I’m not really sure how corn fritters came to be such a big part of our childhood. No one else in our extended family seems to make this Southern speciality. My mother would make them for dinner during corn season and then throughout the winter with frozen corn. We knew just three things about corn fritters: They were fried. They were a vegetable but you were allowed to pour maple syrup over them. And they were delicious.
I realized though, that I had never made them myself. Ever. There are certain things that you don’t make that often as a single gal. Pancakes, waffles, anything that comes in big batches, is just not in my normal routine, and tends to only happen on holidays or vacations, when I have house guests or am recipe developing for work. I’m also realizing lately that there are a few foods that are so identified with my mom, that I get misty while making them. These fritters so symbolize a moment in time that is just carefree and happy that it’s hard to imagine having them without her there. But these are too good to just be a sticky maple syrup coated memory.
So I scooped out 1 cup of corn from the bed pillow of a storage bag and mixed it in a large bowl with the yolk of one egg and 1/4 cup of whole milk before adding 1 rounded cup of flour, 1/2 a teaspoon of baking powder, 1/2 a teaspoon of sea salt, a few grinds of black pepper and a dash of ground cardamon, which was certainly not in my Mom’s original recipe. Then a stiffly beaten egg white got folded in. I dropped spoonfuls of batter into a skillet with about and inch of bubbling oil and cooked on each side until golden and crisp, about 1 1/2 minutes. They were drained on a paper-towel lined plate and then drenched in maple syrup, but the leftovers were great with a creamy sriracha sauce the next day as well.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
