Debi: Cornbread and Butter Beans

This is our favorite song at home these days:

Cornbread and butter beans, and you across the table
Eating beans and making love as long as I am able
Hoeing corn and cotton too, and when the day is over
Ride a mule, then cut the fool and love again all over

It's a great song, old as dirt probably, and a perfect encapsulation of how we want to live. Of course, we aren't farmers -- far from it; we are city mice! -- but the idea that you can sum life up as a series of meals eaten together and sessions of love surrounding some honest work, well, that's just perfect.

Because we've been singing this obsessively since the new Carolina Chocolate Drops CD came out, I decided to try MAKING the very meal in the song. I am not all that good at cornbread, but using Stori's recipe, it came out pretty good! The butterbeans were a different story. David doesn't love beans like the kids and I do, so they had to be part of something bigger. We tried a butterbean stew, with carrots and leeks and mushrooms and peanut butter and soy sauce. It wasn't half-bad!

However, the cornbread was only a minor hit. Everyone had some, but there was a good half-pan left over. As a result, we had to find something to do with it before it dried out and became squirrel food in our alley garbage can. I did some google searching, and discovered this wonderful recipe for fried cornbread with blueberries. Wow. MAKE THIS NOW, PEOPLE.

So, THANK YOU, Stori, for getting that cornbread made over here. It was even better the next morning.