Feeling Corny

One of my favorite crops in last summer's garden was my painted mountain corn. It is not a fresh-eating corn. It is a flour corn. It grows in rich hues of deep burgundy, nearly black, purple, yellow, and mauve. My children and Mr. Blueberry Eyes' friends from across the fence took great delight in helping shuck the corn, oohing and aahing over the the colors they discovered.

I laid the cobs out to dry on a stand in my garage and left them there for several weeks. When they were hard and dry, we

twisted our rubber-gloved hands over them to remove the kernels and left them in a bowl.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally got around to making it into cornmeal in my grinder. I put the mill on the "cereal" setting and was delighted with the cornmeal that resulted. It was a pale, cream color with lots of red, purple, and blakish specks in it. It was truly beautiful.
But it was the flavor of the cornbread that excited us most. It had
a yummy, nutty flavor that is unsurpassed.

I held some of my seed out so that I could replant. I'm glad I did. I use a seed catalog that carefully tests their heirloom seed for GMO contamination and I was sad to see that my Painted Mountain corn wasn't in that catalog this year. I'm worried that maybe it didn't survive the testing process.

But, I still have my seed and I can plant lots of it and save my seed from year to year. I decided to test its germination rate so I could know what to expect. Out of 10 kernals, 10 sprouted. That is amazing, considering that much corn has a germination rate of about 30-40%.
It was quite an empowering feeling to make a finished bread product from what we had raised in the garden! Yummy! - Nanette