This post goes to the facebook group Home Bakers Guild, as part of their Blogger Tuesdays.

This is Rajani here, I blog at My Kitchen Trials. Thank you for having me at the guild again as part of Blogger Tuesdays this month.

I blog because I love food. And food photography. But the main reason is I also like to think out loud. My loud mouth has gotten me into a lot of tight spots in real life, but thankfully that’s not happened much in the blog space till now.

I like to record the little things in my life, the everyday things that we love at that moment but soon gets forgotten in the rush of life. And at times, I like to talk about the big things too.

I was here in this forum for June Blogger Tuesdays with two posts. I posted them from my home in Chennai.I have traveled a long way from that time. Literally! I have crossed the oceans and traveled 10 hours back in time. I have come to another country, another continent, another world.

See….big things!!

I boarded that flight to US in July mid (remind me to tell you that story some other time. Excerpts include a delayed flight from Chennai, raised BP, fight over checking in the cabin baggage, Olympic style midnight marathon at the airport to catch the connecting international flight and a literal last minute boarding).

The man, my dear husband, was already there a couple of months before in the US. The house hunting was over, the car was bought. The tough part was over, all I had to do was to step into the semi-set house, fix it up fully and start running it. A piece of cake, right?

What I didn’t know was when a man says the kitchen is already set, he might mean,”That’s where the salt is. That’s all one needs for cooking, right?”

You miss your comfortable home the most when you are standing in the kitchen with a big cabbage in your hand, wondering how to cut it because there is no knife or a cutting board.

You miss the simple things in life that you took for granted.

It snowballs and then you miss your family, friends and the fun you had back home.

It is a task to remind oneself that there are fun times ahead too, but that’s not the first thought that comes when you look at that cabbage in hand.

Relocating and starting from scratch is no cake walk, at least not for me. It’s been one day at a time, one meal at a time. But gets better everyday and it helps that we now have a knife and cutting board as well in the kitchen :-).

For the recipe today, I have chosen a savory treat. It’s slightly adapted from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking From My Home to Yours. You can view the recipe in the book preview as well.

I am trying a corn muffin for the first time. LOVED it would be an understatement. These were quite a different treat from the usual sweet bakes and the whole batch disappeared before I could even get a decent click! These freeze well, so you can make ahead if you want to.

See you all next week!

Makes : 12 

Ingredients:

Dry Ingredients:

• 2 cups all purpose flour (or 1 cup flour + 1 cup cornmeal)
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1 tbsp baking powder (yes, tbsp – not tsp)
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp chilli powder (or more, per your taste)
• 3/4 spoon ground pepper powder

Wet Ingredients:

• 1 cup buttermilk ( 1 blended 1/2 cup yogurt + 1/2 cup water and measured out one cup buttermilk)
• 100 gm (1 stick) butter, melted and cooled
• 1 large egg yolk ( I used an egg instead)
• Water, as needed

Oher stuff:

• 1/2 cup corn, frozen or fresh
• 1 small jalapeno pepper, seeded and chopped fine
• 1/4 red pepper, seeded and chopped fine
• 2 tbsp cilantro, cleaned and chopped fine

Method:

Heat oven to 200C/400F. Grease a muffin tray and keep aside.

Cut the butter into cubes and melt, set aside to cool.

In a large pan, mix the dry ingredients together. Ie, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, salt, pepper and chilli powder until well combined.

Once the butter is cooled, add the prepared buttermilk and egg/egg yolk and mix well until combined.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry. Whisk until combined. Don’t over mix.  I had to add some water also to get this consistency. If it happens to you as well, add water in tablespoons, until you get a lumpy batter. Don’t add too much water all at once.

Add the corn kernels,  chopped red pepper, jalapenos and coriander leaves. Stir it in.  

Divide the batter evenly into the muffin molds and bake for about 20 minutes or so, this time may vary from oven to oven. You can check whether the muffins are done by inserting a skewer or thin knife inserted into the middle of muffins. It is done if the skewer/knife comes out without any crumbs attached to it.

 

Remove from the oven and let it cool down for 5 minutes in the pan itself. Carefully take them out and serve once they are warm. These can be cling wrapped and frozen as well.

 

Grab one and have it as soon as it’s cool enough to pop into your mouth, else they will all be finished before you realize it!