a chilly day is good for chili!

you (silly you) may think that a “chilly day” means it was cold.   nope.  not in wisconsin after the snowiest winter ever! a chilly day (high near 45 degrees!) seems downright springlike.  and everyone in town was out celebrating the best way we know how–walking, biking, running and generally soaking up some sunshine.  i really wanted to get out and enjoy it along with everyone else, but i was in a meeting until about 2:00 and then the couch and its beautiful quilt were calling my name for a quick nap and then the gravity under the couch somehow got turned up awfully high and i just luxuriated in a cozy, dozy state until my very wonderful husband insisted that we go out for a bike ride.  since he had gone to the trouble of airing up the tires on both of our bikes and oiling my bike chain for me, how could i possibly refuse?  my hip has still been giving me some trouble (don’t worry, i’m now seeing a physical therapist and we’re fixing it, slowly but surely!  i will (cross your fingers) be running again soon!) so i was a bit nervous about diving right into our usual 18 mile route, so i asked if we could do a shorter ride today.  we did the lake wingra loop, which mr. h-s said he’d never done before.  hooray!  i got to show him new parts of our neighborhood!  granted, the reason he’s probably never done it before is its measly 8 mile length, but by the end of the ride, we were both happy to quit at 8 miles.  45 degrees with a small breeze gets a bit more brisk on a bicycle.  cold fingers, cold legs and cold lungs that brought back a cough mr. h-s thought he’d kicked were enough to get us back indoors.

so, an easy dinner of chili and cornbread.  ever since college, we’d been making jiffy cornbread.  it’s cheap and easy, so i tried to ignore the weird chemical taste it leaves on the roof of my mouth.  slowly, i’ve been eliminating much of those kinds of “cheap and easy” foods from our diet.  since we had no jiffy mix and since i really wanted cornbread, i thought tonight would be a good night to try to make it from scratch.  can’t be that hard, right?  i used my new favorite recipe finding webtool (it searches food blogs for the recipe you’re looking for, so usually in addition to a mouth-watering and rapturous description of the food, you get some great photography and a good story!) and found several good looking recipes, but i wanted something really simple and straightforward.  i found it at this website.  this blog doesn’t necessarily have the prettiest pictures, but this recipe sounded like a winner.  i don’t have buttermilk, but i do keep powdered buttermilk on hand, and the cornmeal that i have right now is made from blue corn, so that’s why my cornbread has that funny color (that photo is actually pretty close to the real color).  it was very simple to mix up, but although the toothpick came out clean after 23 minutes and the edges were pulled away from the pan, the middle is still a bit too moist for my liking (not soupy, but … really moist.  maybe even gummy.).  but the edges!  oh heaven!  they have the softest crumb and the very best flavor!  just like heaven when they have a drizzle of honey on top.  mmmm….. no chemical aftertaste!  i think next time i’ll make them in a muffin tin and then they’ll be perfect.  and easier to eat.  that’s a keeper recipe.