Real Deal Cornmeal

We like to grow our own food here.  Eggs, milk, veggies, meat, and when we can, grain.  Rye does pretty well for us, but growing wheat and corn has been challenging so far. We haven't given up on it.  Some people might think that it's too much work to grow your own food, but we feel that it is worth the effort.

The cornmeal that is available in my local grocery store is de-germinated.  That means the germ is removed, which makes it more shelf stable, but also much less nutritious.  It's pretty tasteless and is also processed from GMO corn.  Because we enjoy cornbread around here, I have been wanting to find a good variety of corn to grow for cornmeal.  I tried blue, which was pretty tasty, but it's more of a flour corn.  So this past year I tried a new (to me) variety called Nothstine Dent.  It took about a year from ordering the seed to eating the cornbread.  Good thing we are patient people!

If you were viewing this blog last summer, you saw this dismal sight... my small cornmeal corn patch flattened by wind and rain.  It was just tasseling.  We propped it up and hoped for the best.

The yield was pretty small.  Just half a grocery bag of ears that we dried in the basement.

Rollie shelled the corn for us by hand.  It was pretty clean but putting it in this plastic bowl helped remove the chaffy bits because the static of the bowl made them stick to the sides.

And here is the grinder.  It belonged to Kevin's Grandpa Reuben, who was known as a bit of an eccentric when he was grinding grain with it back in the 70's.  Come to think of it, I guess some folks might think of us a little eccentric too.  Whatever.

The finished stoneground cornmeal.  We were surprised to get 6.9 pounds of it.

With supper that night,  cornbread made from Aunt Virgies recipe!  Delish!

Until next time (and hopefully we will have some baby goat photos to share then...),
be well folks.