New Recipes - Good & Bad

As part of the process to revamp our menu I have been trying out some new menu items.  Some items, such as the Tomato Beef Stew we tried yesterday, have been completely rejected by many of the children and will not be included in the new menu.  My family however loved it and was pleased that there were leftovers.

Last week I was more successful.  While searching for new ideas for new menu items I found a recipe for Corn Dogs and thought that might be interesting to try.  However, after reading through the recipe I thought it sounded like it would be an awful lot of work and there has to be an easier way to make corn dogs for my group.

So, I found a corn bread recipe for my bread maker…

• 1 ¼ cup of water
• 2 eggs
• 1 ½ tsp salt
• 3 Tbsp honey
• 2 Tbsp shortening
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 cup cornmeal
• 1 tsp yeast

Measure ingredients into baking pan in the order recommended by the manufacturer.  Place pan in oven chamber and select sweet cycle – I chose the dough cycle because I didn’t want to make a loaf of corn bread.

Then, I split the corn bread dough into two parts – the dough was a very moist so I had to add a fair amount of extra flour to handle it.  I spread one part of the dough into the bottom of a greased 9 x 13 pan and then covered it with wieners – split in half lengthwise. I added a few dollops of ketchup and mustard and then spread the remaining corn bread dough on top.  I baked it in a 400 degree F oven for 25 minutes and everyone ate it.   I called it ‘Corn Dog Bake’ for lack of any creative inspiration when it comes to naming things and served it with coleslaw and milk.

Next time I will do some things differently;

• Add a little more flour to the bread machine recipe
• Put the condiments under the wieners instead of on top – placing wieners on the slippery sauce isn’t difficult but spreading cornbread dough on condiments is.

I might try experimenting with some other meat instead of wieners – maybe cooked ground beef mixed with creamed corn.  Bacon might be good too – everything tastes better with bacon