Cornbread and Moonshine

My neighborhood has started a new tradition of cooking things off.  It’s no longer good enough to just get together for a hot dogs and beers, like normal neighbors do, we have make a contest of it.  The whole cook-off thing started over the summer with ribs, which are the only exception to my half-assed vegetarianism. (Some vegetarians make an exception for turkey on Thanksgiving or can’t live without bacon bits.  While I’ll can’t handle a hamburger and the idea of eating a chicken breast makes me feel vomitous, I remain committed to sucking the meat off the bones of pigs.)  Last weekend it was a chili cook-off.  (My vegetarian chili took second place among a sea of carnivores.  Woop woop!  The key was to wait until everyone was pleasantly lubed up and all ballots were cast before revealing the true hippie nature of my chili.  Bwa ha ha! (not sure why this gets the evil laugh-it just does))  Since there were a plethora of awesome games on Saturday, my neighbor dragged a bunch of t.v.s out onto the deck and we ate chili, drank beer, and watched football all afternoon.

After Notre Dame lost to Navy for the second time in three years (WTF?) and UNC beat Duke in what was somehow a real game, the neighbor who was hosting the cook-off broke out the communal mason jar of moonshine and our quaint little neighborhood chili cook-off quickly deteriorated into a cornbread chucking contest.  Now we’re usually not ones to waste food–if a recipe goes awry, we make fun of it, power through, then take it off the do-again list.  I was raised on Jiffy cornbread, so that has always been my go-to, but the night before the cook-off I made the mistake of looking at the back of the box and realized I couldn’t even sound out most of the ingredients so I tried, in my silly crunchy northern way, to make this staple of the south good for you.  The “healthy” cornbread I came up with was beyond powering through.  In fact, it was of oh-my-god-spit-it-out caliber.  The dense consistency and muffin shape of the cornbread lent itself to ideal chuckability though, so the game became who could throw the cornbread the farthest (the goal being to get it over the fence two doors down) and then who could land the cornbread on my screenless screened in porch from my neighbor’s deck (you had to throw it at an angle to clear the fence and then get it through the porch railing).  After everyone had a turn, we headed out with flashlights to hunt down the corn missiles to see who won.  Here are some pictures my neighbor took.

Pre-mason jar

Post-mason jar

Note the cornbread remained in one piece, even after hitting the side of the house.

This one also remained unscathed.

There are two take aways from this story.  The first is to make sure your stable of friends at all time includes someone with a mason jar full of clear liquid that’s strong enough to remove nail polish.  Only good can come of it.  The second is that while you should definitely make the award winning Chili Fit For A Queen that can be found on Half-Assed Vegetarian (use ground turkey instead of soy veggie crumbles if that’s how you roll), you should, under no circumstances, try to make “healthy” cornbread.  It just wasn’t meant to be.