On a brighter note ...

So ... on a brighter note ... I made cornbread this morning. ('Tis the season, no?)  I don't use any fancy-schmanzy recipe--just the one from the old Better Homes & Gardens Cook Book that I inherited from my mother. Pretty basic stuff. (See recipe at the bottom of this post.)

Okay, I did pop in a little whole-wheat flour instead of all-white. Sue me.

It always takes longer to bake than the 12-15 minutes the (lying) recipe calls for--sometimes five minutes more. Pull it out of the oven too soon and you have some cornbread--and some cornmeal hot cereal.

But it's a quickie--about a half-hour from I think I'll make cornbread to That looks great--when can we cut it?

Minimal clean-up, too.

And a lingering aroma--all throughout the day.

My mom used to make this recipe during the holidays, though cornmeal was not otherwise a part of my boyhood diet--except for cornmeal pancakes that my maternal Osborn men would make (my grandfather, my uncle (Mom's brother)). Those were awesome and one of the great benefits of a visit to or from the Osborns. I've never really matched the quality of what they did, but maybe boyhood memory prefers perfection, and adult consciousness recognizes that pretty much everything is a little screwed up, you know?

During the November and December holidays, we ate chunks of cornbread, and Mom would often (always? can't be sure) make a cornbread stuffing for the turkey. We've been doing the same in recent years.

Taste and texture, of course, are freeways to the past. A single bite, and it's 1954 again. And I'm in Enid, Oklahoma; I'm just ten years old. And the cornbread--swabbed with butter (no more for me in these cholesterol-awareness days)--goes down easily--much more easily, say, than the green beans (or hated Lima beans) that lie, ignored, on my plate. I must confront them later, I know: Family Rule #327 (Clean Your Plate). But Later is not Now. And Now is for cornbread swabbed with butter, all to celebrate the holiday--and the endless life that lies ahead of me ...