Posts – Page 18 – Hugh's Blog

The Ugly Part

In our last house, we had a tiny bathroom. Like, 5 feet by 5 feet. The sink was in a tiny 2-foot-wide nook in the corner. All of me wouldn’t fit in the mirror. The tiled tub surround was made up of random colored tiles with no apparent order or design.

But that wasn’t the bad part.

When we moved in, we spent a lot of money getting the kitchen done and buying appliances and getting the flooring right, after ripping up layers and layers of plywood. We didn’t have any money to address the squishy floor in the bathroom. Basically, we spent the next two years hoping we wouldn’t fall through the floor.

It was a one-bathroom house, which also led to our delay, because anything we did to that bathroom would put our only working bathroom out of order. And at the time, I was working an insane schedule running a day shelter for people experiencing homelessness.

When I do something like renovate a bathroom, I have thought about it for months. I get a little obsessive, searching all sorts of ideas out on Pinterest, googling clearances, searching shopping sites for options. And so, when I start, it is a little like being on auto-pilot, because it has filled my head for months at that point. I have already built it three or four times in my head.

Even so, that renovation was fraught with difficulties. The subfloor was rotten, and had to be replaced. The cast iron toilet flange broke, and had to be replaced. The sink fittings had to be replaced. The water shut off had to be replaced. I had to tile the floor. Twice. I have never had anything go as wrong as that tiny bathroom did.

A friend let us sleep at his house the weekend I did the major work, but even so, we had a less than optimal bathroom for about a week. And it took a month of evenings and weekends for me to get “done”. And it all cost, almost to the penny, twice as much as our already stretched budget had allowed for the project.

I will tell you that when we were done, that bathroom was my favorite part of that house. Literally everyone who came over remarked on it. I had penny tile on the floor, corrugated metal wainscoting, and espresso shop-made trim. It was still tiny, and still had a crazy tile surround, but now it looked more eccentric than random.

Now, it sounds like this is going to be a happy ending sort of thing, and the end was worth the hassle and yada yada. And yes, you could tell the story that way, but I skipped ahead a bit. I want to talk about what it was like in the middle of that project.

My only bathroom was in shambles. I was exhausted, and out of money. I had to reinstall the toilet twice in the middle of the chaos because we needed to use the bathroom and had no other options. It looked dramatically uglier at this point than it did before I had done anything. I felt like I was moving backwards.

I was in the middle of what I call the ugly part.

Every renovation has the ugly part. It’s when you had to break up the tile floor. Rip out the sheetrock. Pull down the wall. It looks worse now than it did before you started. And it’s really easy to look around at all the chaos and to feel like this was all a horrible mistake. Maybe you should have paid a contractor to do it. Maybe you should have been happy with the ugly floors. Maybe you shouldn’t have tried to do it yourself.

It’s the ugly part.

Now, if you do enough renovation work, you eventually come to realize that this is part of the process. To fix things, you often have to break them worse than they were before. Things often do have to get worse before they get better. And when you have pulled a rabbit out of a hat a dozen times or so, you come to expect that the 13^th hat, there will be a rabbit in that one, too.

But it’s not just renovations that have an ugly part. Lots of things do.

Medical school has organic chemistry. The second year of law school almost wiped a friend of mine out of the process. The third day you lift weights you will wish you had stayed on the couch. That third week of Couch to 5K has knocked me out three times.

Anytime you seek to change the status quo, you will have to disrupt things. Break things. Rip things out. And in the short run, it will look worse. But it’s not worse – it’s just not done.

It’s the ugly part.

It’s part of the process, but it is crucial to remember that it isn’t the end of the process.

Or, at least, it doesn’t have to be. That part is up to you.

So You Had A Relapse

Hey there.

Yes, you.

Can we talk?

I saw you with your New Year’s resolutions. You were going to quit drinking. Or start saving 10% of your paycheck. Or start meditating 30 10 minutes every day. Read to your kids every night. You joined the gym. You bought a new planner.

You had plans, friend! You had the best of intentions.

New Year, New You!

And yet, here we are. Ten days into the new year, and you already took that drink you had forsworn, have eaten things you didn’t plan to, have skipped a day at the gym, meditated twice, overdrawn your checking account.

Dammit! How did this happen, you ask? You had a plan!

But as Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. Plans happen in a vacuum, and life, sadly, does not. So the healthy food remains in the cupboard, you haven’t saved $10 yet, and you’ve already had your first hangover this year. When life happened, your plans went out the window.

And now you feel like you have let yourself down. And maybe you feel like a failure. Like you can’t change.

I have spent more than 15 years watching people dramatically change their lives despite horrific odds stacked against them. And in that same time, I have seen people with every advantage as their lives fell apart. I know a little bit about how people change.

People change when they are ready. It’s that simple. If you are truly ready to start meditating, to quit drinking, to start saving money, if you have reached what people who study these things call the “action” stage, you will make changes. And if you are not, you won’t.

The chart up there is from the “Trans-theoretical Model of Change”, and it changed my life. Literally. The idea is, as people change, they go through stages.

First, change isn’t even on your radar. Then you are considering it. Then you are determined, and maybe start researching. Then you take concrete action. And it’s easy to think you have changed. This was you on January 3^rd.

Action.

But then.

It’s important to realize that relapse is also part of change. In the 12 Step Programs, the literature suggests that most people relapse on average 7 times before they quit the behavior they want to change.

So, you had a relapse. You went back to doing whatever it was you used to do. It’s OK. It happens. Most of us don’t get it right the first time. What matters is, if you are ready to change – like, really ready – that you start again. Because once you realize you have made a mistake, the most important thing to do is quit making it.

You don’t have to wait until tomorrow to go back on your vitamins. You don’t have to start exercising next week. You don’t have to wait until New Year’s Day to pick up a new habit. You don’t have to start being sober again tomorrow.

You can be sober from now on. You can eat the way you planned to starting now, at the next meal. You can start meditating today instead of tomorrow.

If you are ready, you can change. Even if you relapsed. Especially if you relapsed.

Because you already did the hard work of getting to the action stage.

Because you deserve the benefits of your change.

Because it doesn’t matter how many times you fall down.

Because it only matters how many times you get back up.

Vernacular shelving

Who invented the table?

Who was the first person to make a chair that looked like a chair?

Think about the first person who made a box. Did they have any inkling of how virtually all furniture in the future would be based on their design?

The idea of a thing like a chair, which exists in some form in every culture in the world, having been invented seems strange, because tables and chairs and boxes and shelves and stools didn’t have a singular inventor – they were simultaneously developed by many different people all over the world, and then traveled, infecting others with their designs. And until very recently, most furniture was made by the end user, or at least by someone in their family or village.

Most furniture that has existed in the world was utilitarian in form – they built a chair because they needed a chair – not because they needed something to put in the corner to balance the plant stand in the other corner. And it was made by the end user because until very recently in human history purchased furniture was the province of the very wealthy. Most furniture was made quickly and in a utilitarian manner because the person building it was one bad harvest away from death by starvation.

Utilitarian furniture made by the end user is called “vernacular” furniture by people who study such things. And you need not think it strange that most people could build their own furniture – until a generation or two ago, nearly every house had at least one person in it capable of making a full sit-down supper each night. These are just skills we lost.

But like cooking, they are skills we can reclaim.

I am renovating our 70-year-old unretouched pantry/laundry room right now, which is the first part of the larger kitchen renovation I am planning for this summer. And we needed some new pantry shelves for canned goods. They don’t have to be Instagram-able. They need to hold up cans of food. They need to be painted, in order to protect the shelves and make them easier to clean. They need to be strong.

I need vernacular shelves.

Yesterday afternoon I knocked them out – 60 inches long, 42 inches high, to go under a window in the laundry room. I made them from 1×8 Southern Yellow Pine, the wood of Southern vernacular furniture for generations of my people, acquired from Home Depot. Southern Yellow Pine is stronger than Maple when it has fully dried, and it has a pronounced grain pattern that some people love.

The shelves are spaced 9.5 inches apart, so two normal tin cans will fit on each shelf, stacked on top of each other, and they are 7.25 inches wide, so two cans will fit front to back as well. The top shelf is five inches under the window sill, so the top shelf has room for only one can in height. I used some 3/4inch quarter round as cleats to hold the shelves in place, which were then glued and screwed in place.

Tomorrow I will caulk and paint them so they can cure over the weekend and I can load them up next week.

Literally the only tools it took to make this was a saw, a speed square, a pencil, and a drill/driver, some 2 inch screws and wood glue (These are all simple tools you should probably have as part of a basic DIY kit.). It took an hour to build. It will theoretically hold 266 standard cans of food in a space previously unused, taking up less than 3.5 square feet, and the total cost, not counting paint, even in these inflationary times was less than the cost of a single Billy Bookcase from Ikea, and it will last the rest of my life.

Cooking From The Pantry

I believe in having a certain amount of food on hand. Generally, two to three months’ worth of regular, everyday food, not dehydrated tofu you keep in a bunker out back.

Before the pandemic, this might have led you to believe I was some sort of doomsday prepper, but after the supply chain shortages of the last two years, I just feel like I am a realist. I actually have a whole series of posts planned for some point about what reasonable food reserves look like, and how I do it, but today I want to share another benefit of having a deep pantry – the ability to create a good dinner quickly without leaving the house.

Tonight I came home and it was 5:30 and I realized I had forgot to set anything out to thaw for supper, and what’s worse, I had forgotten that I had a meeting at 7 I couldn’t miss.

So I looked in the pantry for inspiration, and saw a couple of potatoes that were in danger of going bad, so I needed to do something with them. We have chickens, so we always have eggs on hand. But even if I didn’t have chickens, eggs last a really long time – much longer than you think – in the fridge. So I pretty much always have lots of eggs on hand. And we always have lots of canned and frozen vegetables.

So I peeled the two potatoes and then sliced them on the mandolin about a ¼ inch thick. I took down a 10-inch nonstick skillet and put it on medium heat, and then added a tablespoon of olive oil to it. Now, you could use any fat here – butter freezes like a dream, by the way, and I probably have 10 pounds of it in the freezer and there is always a jar of bacon grease in the door of my refrigerator – but I like the flavor of olive oil on potatoes and I have a bottle that lives on the counter by the stove.

Take the potato slices, and place them in the oil so they overlap and cover the entire bottom of the skillet. Add a generous portion of salt and pepper. Again, here is a place you could make changes – I have been known to use a big shake or two of Creole seasoning here, or seasoning salt, or, like I did tonight, just salt and pepper. All depends on what sort of mood you are in.

I like chicken stock, and make it when I have bones to use up, but for things like this, I just keep a jar of the good bouillon base in the fridge (and another, unopened one, in the pantry). Before I peeled the potatoes I had turned on the electric kettle that lives on our counter, and so I added 1 teaspoon of chicken base to 1 cup of boiling water and whisked the hell out of it, to get the base to dissolve. I then pour the cup of stock in the skillet and partially cover it, letting it simmer a few minutes.

While it’s simmering, I open a can of whole kernel corn and reserve the liquid, but then dump the corn in the skillet, spreading it around so there is a layer of corn on top of the potatoes. By now, the potatoes should be getting soft and the liquid boiling away, but if it is boiling away too fast and your potatoes are not yet soft, then add some of the corn broth to the skillet for the additional liquid you need. If they are softening fine, keep it going until the chicken broth has mostly boiled away.

What you are going for here – and it will take you somewhere between 10-15 minutes – is for the potatoes to be soft, and for the liquid to be 90% gone.

While it’s cooking away, you should get out 5 eggs, and scramble them with a whisk until smooth. Then either shred some cheddar cheese, or, if you got some on sale cheaper than the block of un-shredded cheddar, get out a half cup of shredded cheese. (As an aside, if you do get a bunch of pre-shredded cheese, it also freezes well, and still works for the things it is good for, like this.)

Now your potatoes should be soft, and the liquid mostly cooked away. Before the next step, turn your broiler on high and let it warm up. Then pick up the skillet and shake it a bit, making sure the potatoes haven’t stuck to the bottom of the pan. Then pour the eggs over the contents of the skillet, then sprinkle the cheese all over the tops of the eggs. Then take a spatula and gently lift the edges of the potatoes, so the egg mixture slips amongst the potatoes.

After it has begun to set, constantly moving your spatula around under the edges so it doesn’t stick, then slide the skillet six inches under the broiler and let the top of the egg mixture cook and bubble until it turns the lightest of browns. Pull it out and set it on a trivet to cool while you set the table, then cut it into 4 wedges. It actually plates up better if you let it cool 10 or 15 minutes before you serve it, but I often eat it hot and let the plate be a little messy. I put hot sauce on top of mine tonight, but sometimes do chow-chow or salsa instead.

The worldly among you will recognize this is a sort of a frittata if you are Italian, or a tortilla if you are Spanish. I ate them for years without knowing they were European. This will serve two people for supper, or four people for lunch. It’s free of meat but has 44 grams of protein, and if you used vegetable broth or the juice from the can of corn instead of chicken broth, it would be full-on vegetarian and, of course, it’s gluten free. And it only messed up one skillet and a bowl to scramble the eggs in, only took 20 minutes start to finish to make, and I didn’t even have to have a plan.

Why Do You Like to Cook?

Kaylee, age 13: Uncle Hugh, how often do you cook?

Me, age 49: I cook something almost every day, and some days I cook two or three times a day. Why?

Kaylee: Well, I could tell by the way you stirred the food around that you know what you are doing. Do you like cooking?

Me: I do. I really do.

Kaylee: Why?

Me: Hmmm. Well, there are several reasons. The first is that when I left home, I could suddenly eat anything I wanted. But most of the food I could afford and had access to wasn’t very good. So learning how to cook was a way to be kind to myself. I deserved to have good food, and the only way I knew to get it was to cook it myself.

But more than that, it was that there were people in my life that I dearly loved, and now they were gone. And when I thought back over my memories of them, most of those memories involved food. Like today, we ate chicken and dressing. I can never eat chicken and dressing without thinking of Aunt Louise. But how often in your day-to-day life do you get to eat chicken and dressing? But by knowing how to make it, I can feel that good feeling any time I want to. Knowing how to cook is like having a photo album filled with people you love, that you have an opportunity to see any time you need to eat, which is multiple times a day.

Another reason I like to cook is that most of my adult life has been trying to solve unsolvable problems. Like, no matter how hard I work, people are still hungry, still homeless, still lonely, still addicts. You can work hard all day, all week, all month, even, and at the end of that time feel like absolutely nothing has changed.

But I can have some rice and some sausage and a pepper and an onion and a few other things, and it doesn’t look like anything at all, but if you know how you can turn that pile of random things into jambalaya. I can start with chaos and end with something that tastes good, that reminds me of people I love, and that makes other people happy and fills your belly in the process. It’s the one part of my life I can fix. I can turn the chaotic into something good, and I can usually do that li less than an hour. How cool is that!

But my favorite reason? Today. We sat around a table, and we ate food that was good, and we talked about stories from our past, and people we missed who were not there, and the food reminded us of meals we had had like this before, and the people who had been there, and for a minute, we all felt very loved. I love knowing how to make that happen.

On Branding

People who know me well know how much I love Jacques Pepin. If you do not know, he is a classically trained French chef, who began his apprenticeship in France at the age of 13, who worked in Paris and the was personal chef to three French Presidents, including Charles de Gaulle. Eventually, he would move to the US in 1959, would work at La Pavilion in New York City, and was offered the job as chef to John F. Kennedy when he was President.

Pepin turned him down, and instead went to work designing menus for Howard Johnson’s. which was then the largest chain of sitdown restaurants in the country. Imagine turning down the opportunity to be the White House Chef to work at Applebee’s, say.

When asked in an interview why he turned it down, he said, “Be chef to a President? I had already done that. I wanted to do something new.”

I’ve always admired him for that. To not take himself so seriously. To be willing to put aside the accolades and to be so self-confident that the prestige doesn’t matter to you. To be content to have “done that” and to try something new, something that isn’t what people expect from you.

I have blogged, off and on, for 19 years, for myself and for organizations and companies I ran. Then since 2007 I have been active on Social Media, for the last 5 years or so most heavily on Facebook. And all of those forms of online expression benefit you most when you “brand” yourself. When I started blogging, I ran a small bookstore, and so I wrote mostly about that, and so I was branded as a “bookseller”.

When I moved to North Carolina to start a homeless ministry, I wrote about issues of homelessness and faith and issues like LGBT rights and racism that intersect with homelessness, and became branded as that guy. The last 3-4 years I did that work I had begun to be sought after as a trainer and speaker on those issues, and was pastoring a weekly worshipping community made up of people experiencing homelessness, and someone called me the “pastor of last resort” and I got branded as that.

But even normal people get branded these days. I have a friend that curses like a sailor in person, but she won’t use swear words on Facebook.

“People wouldn’t expect me to do that there”, she told me.

In other words, it would be off-brand.

An early influence on my understanding of ministry was a white Mississippi Baptist preacher named Will Campbell. He was one of those larger than life characters that thrive in the Deep South, a Baptist preacher who smoked cigarettes, drank bourbon and cursed a blue streak. But he also did some of the most important behind the scenes work in the Civil Rights movement, and wrote a book that called out the mainline white church back in the early 1960’s.

In an article about Will in Rolling Stone back in 1990, there is this paragraph:

He does not like to be called the Reverend Campbell because “it sounds condescending and a bit imperialistic. Some people call me a counselor,” Campbell says, “but it’s such an arrogant concept—like I can do something better for you than you can do for yourself. I’m not a reverend, and I’m not a counselor. I’m just a preacher.” Even the word ministry gives him trouble. “I don’t really have a ministry,” he insists. “I have a life.”

Over the last month, I have blogged every day, without a theme. Some days I talked about my struggles with ADHD, and other days I shared a childhood memory or talked about Southern food traditions or shared something that happened to me that day or wrote something somebody found inspirational or just told a funny story.

If I were smart, I would only write 3 times a week about, say, Southern food, and have beautiful images and printable recipes and put together a collection and then a cookbook and start a podcast where I interview other white dudes (because aren’t most podcasts basically white dudes interviewing other white dudes?) about food, and before you know it, I would be a “brand”.

I watched a YouTube video the other day where some influencer was tending to his backyard chickens, and his 10-year-old daughter was with him, and he put the camera in her face and she knew exactly how to mug for the camera. She was being trained to be a brand at 10 years old.

But in a world where everyone is trying to put a label on you and put you in a box, to refuse to stay in their box is a political action. I keep a file open on my computer, and most days I jot things in it. Like a running journal. On January 1 of 2021, I wrote:

I wrote exactly 2 things on my blog last year. Just 2. Part of that is Facebook cannibalized my blog, part of it is that the newsletters took another part of it, but mostly it was that I was unsure what to write about. Branding and all. So to hell with branding. I will write about walks, and spoons, and woodworking, and gardening, and depression, and food, and sermons and all of it. I don’t have a ministry – I have a life, as Will C said. Publish and be damned.

It took me a while to get there, but this blog is the result of that entry. This blog is intentionally unbrandable, because it is not a brand – it is my life. I am funny, and angry, and sentimental, and Southern, and opinionated about cornbread and beans and a sucker for Christmas and cynical of all of it. This blog is about all of those things, because it is the story of one guy who is trying to live a good life.

To paraphrase Will Campbell, I don’t have a brand. I have a life.

On Goals

It’s a strange time of year.

Not a bad time, just… strange. It’s a sort of liminal space, where pretty much everyone that can be is done with 2021, and yet 2022 hasn’t started yet.

I try to hold this week as free of commitments as I can, so I can do reflecting on the year that was, and set some intentions for the year to come. But one thing I don’t do is set goals – for New Year’s, or ever.

There are several reasons for this. One is that I spent some time working in a toxic sales environment, and goals were super manipulative ways to get us to produce more. And I hate being manipulated. So when I finally quit that job, I decided I could quit goals, too.

But they weren’t hard to give up, because the reality is, my brain doesn’t work that way. As someone with ADHD, I have an interest-based nervous system. If I’m not interested in the project, no amount of external goals will get me there. And if I am interested, then you can’t make me ignore it. This is both my superpower and my kryptonite – I am not externally motivated.

Goals prey on your dissatisfaction. But I’m not dissatisfied.

Don’t get me wrong – I have things I would like to do. For example, I want to go to both Europe, and Puerto Rico. But if I end up not being able to do that, I will be OK. I work hard to make sure we have enough income to maintain our quality of life, but I am old enough to know that if I made 50% more, I would not be 50% more happy than I am now. Our car is 10 years old, and it makes me just as happy as the 3-month old car I rented a few weeks ago to go on a road trip.

In 2022, I want to be a good husband, want to learn skills I do not currently have, want to have enough income to maintain our quality of life, want to meet interesting people, want to make the world better than I found it. I don’t know what any of that will look like. In fact, there are dozens of ways any of that could look that I would be happy with. But that’s what I want.

A concrete example: Right now, we are looking into renovating our kitchen in the next 18 months or so – like, a down to the studs, new appliances, new cabinets, new floor renovation. I’m interested in it, so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how it can happen. I read articles, watch videos, research appliances, make lists and budgets, and try to figure out ways to make more money to pay for it all. So I guess you could say that is a goal. But I would never say, “By April 15^th of 2023, we will renovate our kitchen.” It will happen when it happens, which is fine, because I enjoy this process. And should our priorities change, and we decide to keep the existing kitchen, that’s fine too. And in the meantime, I’m learning things I did not know, doing work I enjoy, and keeping busy with something that interests me.

As I look back over a career of counseling people who were dissatisfied with their life, their dissatisfaction could often be traced back to their having picked a goal they wanted to accomplish, rather than asking if the work was worth doing.

In the last chapter of The Great Gatsby, Nick says that Gatsby paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. For Gatsby, success could only look one way. The big house, the public acclaim, and crucially, the girl. If any of that did not happen (and, it didn’t), then he processed that as failure. Never mind the fact that he was rich, was acclaimed, was living in a literal mansion and had rose from nothing to prominence. Because he didn’t meet his goal, he wasn’t, to his mind, a success.

So, goals. I don’t set them. Instead, I commit to pay attention, to find out what I’m interested in, and do more of that. I try new things. I give myself permission to fail. And above all, I ask myself if this work is worth doing.

Because for most of us, life isn’t victory or defeat, but the slog of the daily routine. Most of life is process. And if you hate the process, if you don’t think the work is valuable in and of itself, then no amount of success will make up for it.

Leaving Exile

A few days ago, I was talking on the phone to someone who had moved to a new city, after living a long time in the old one.

“It feels different, somehow, living here. Like, I know I intend to stay here. I want to invest here. I want to own a home here, and maybe raise a family here. [The last place] wasn’t like that at all. It was just a place to live because work had moved me there.”

“Ahhh,” I said.

“Ahhh?”

“Yes. You just described the difference between being an exile and being an immigrant.”

I went on to explain that when you are in exile, you leave one place for another, but there is always the hope you will be able to return. Your heart, if you will, belongs someplace else. Immigrants, however, plan on building a life in, and committing to, the new place. There is, if nothing else, a hope that the new place will be where they will write the rest of their story.

It’s like the difference between renting a home and owning one. The owned home will always be cared for more by its occupant than the rented one because they have committed to it for the long haul. They are not just sleeping in a home but investing in it, caring for it with the hope that it will take care of them, too. The renter does the minimum because it does not make sense to invest in a place you will not be staying or profiting from long-term.

I know this because it was my story, too. When I moved to North Carolina 15 years ago, there was never any intention that I would be gone forever. I knew that one day, I would be back. And 12 years later, I was. While in Raleigh, I was in exile.

It doesn’t mean I didn’t invest in Raleigh – I did. I did good work there, helped a lot of people there, and made good friends – lifelong friends – there. But my heart wasn’t there. My heart was in Mississippi, a place that has nurtured and held my people for 200 years. In the Bible, in the book of Jeremiah, the people in exile are told by God that even though they find themselves far from their homeland, they should plant gardens, build houses, and to work for the good of the land in which they find themselves, because whatever hope they have of prospering will come from that place prospering.

That was my experience in Raleigh. I worked hard there. I built things there. They prospered. I prospered. But it wasn’t home.

You can argue that it’s semantics, but I think it’s more like a mindset, or a framing story.

Because life is different when you intend to stay.

Southern AF Cornbread

There are people out there making cornbread for the holidays with sugar and flour. One woman even said on Facebook that she uses Jiffy Cornbread mix to make cornbread dressing.

Some folks just want to watch the world burn.

It’s easy to be critical of other people’s food choices, but I find it helpful to remember that not everyone grew up with the advantages I have, and just don’t know any other way. In light of this, and wanting to be part of the solution and not part of the problem, I have decided to share my Southern AF cornbread recipe that uses neither flour nor sugar with the world. And if it matters to you, It’s gluten free,

This is everyday cornbread. This is why I keep a jug of buttermilk in the fridge. (If you don’t have any other use for buttermilk, you can buy powdered buttermilk in the baking aisle of your store, which keeps forever).

I will be the first to say there are other recipes out there – especially hot water cornbread made when money is tight and buttermilk is a stretch, but I don’t particularly enjoy it, so we will talk of it another day. This is the perfect thing to serve with pinto beans. In fact, growing up beans and cornbread were practically one word.

What you need:

1 cup cornmeal. (Now, white is traditional down here, but yellow is easier to get, and I can’t tell a taste difference. I can tell you that you can fancy this up with using stone ground meal here, but it’s real good if you use generic yellow meal from the grocery store, too.)

1 tsp baking powder. (Some people put more to make it rise more, but I like a denser bread.)

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup buttermilk (If you don’t have any buttermilk, you can make do by adding two tablespoons of lemon juice to a cup of milk and letting it sit out about 15 minutes. You just need an acid to react to the baking powder.)

1 large egg

2 TBS butter, margarine, or bacon drippings (Honestly, they all work about the same. Follow your budget here. We tend to use butter, because we don’t keep margarine in the house.)

1 8 to 10-inch well-seasoned cast iron skillet (I mean, if you are not at a place in your life where someone loves you enough to have given you a cast iron skillet and taught you how to care for it, you could use a cake pan, but it will crust up better in a cast iron skillet.)

What you do:

Preheat the oven to 450.

Put butter in the skillet, put skillet in the oven.

Then mix the dry ingredients in a bowl.

Add egg and buttermilk to the dry stuff, and mix until the batter just has an even consistency. Don’t overmix this – it isn’t cake. Use a spoon, not a blender.

Remove skillet (be careful, it’s hot!), swirl the melted butter all over the skillet, then pour the melted butter into the batter.

Pour batter into the skillet, and jiggle it to evenly distribute the batter.

Put it in the oven and feel morally superior.

It will be done when golden brown on top, the sides are coming away from the side of the skillet, and a knife blade comes out dry from the center.

An 8-inch skillet takes about 20 minutes, a 10 inch one about 17.

We just cut it into wedges and serve it from the skillet – when we were growing up, momma would invert it on a plate and serve it upside down, which bothered me in ways I cannot fully describe. But you do you.

Further notes:

This is a basic, make 30 minutes before supper, all purpose cornbread. This is also good dressing cornbread, if you are making chicken and dressing, but you will want to make it the day before so it can dry out for that. I have, on occasion, added two tablespoons of sugar to this and made muffins with it to save my marriage. Other ways to fancy it up involve adding a half cup of shredded cheese, a handful of frozen corn kernels, or a small can of green chiles. But don’t go too close to the sun here: This is working people’s food.

A Poor Man’s Feast

Last week, my local grocery store had their hams on sale for Christmas, so I bought a small butt ham that weighed about five pounds. I roasted the ham, which was amazing, but I will tell you how I did that another day. The point is, after slicing the ham for sandwiches and breakfast meat and dinner, I was left with a nice bone and some scraps of ham meat, fat, and skin. But not a lot, because I love some damn ham. Because I know somebody is going to ask, I weighed it, and had about half a pound of loose meat left, plus whatever I couldn’t get off the bone. I stuck it all in the fridge.

A few days later, it was cold outside, and I didn’t have a lot of work commitments, and felt like it would be a perfect day for a pot of beans and cornbread. I took a pound of pinto beans and poured them out on a cookie sheet, looking for rocks and dirt. You just pour them out and sort of pick through them with your fingers, shifting them around until you make sure they are clean. Then put them in a large pot and put cold water in the pot until you have about two inches of water over the top of the beans. They need to soak in the water a few hours, and it works better if you stir the soaking beans every once in a while, to make sure water and oxygen gets everywhere.

Now, you don’t have to do this – the soaking I mean. But they taste better if you do. The fresher your beans, the less essential the soaking is, but dried beans look the same whether six months or six years old, and so I always soak them. But don’t soak them overnight, like some folks do, or they will break down too much. Four hours is plenty, two is sufficient, and in a pinch, again, none is probably acceptable.

When they are done soaking, pour the water off the beans, and then put more cold water in the bean pot, again about two inches over the beans. Don’t drown the beans – this isn’t soup, and it isn’t mush, this is beans. Put your ham bone and ham scraps, including the skin and fat, in the pot too, and don’t worry too much if the water doesn’t cover every little bit of the bone. Turn the heat to high.

As an aside – some folk are going to panic about the mention of ham skin going in this. Just cut it into small pieces and go with it. Most of the fat and collagen is going to dissolve and turn into flavor.

While you are waiting for the water to boil, get the rest of your ingredients ready. You need a small onion, maybe the size of a door knob. I like a sweet yellow onion for this, but I imagine any onion is better than no onion. Peel it and cut it into long strips from pole to pole. Peel a large clove of garlic. Put the onions and the clove of garlic (whole) in the water with the beans, and add ½ a tablespoon of salt and ½ a tablespoon of sugar.

I admit the sugar and garlic are controversial choices, and ones I did not grow up with, but choices that dramatically elevate the dish. Also, the beans will probably need another ½ tablespoon of salt later in the cooking, but a lot depends on how salty the ham was, and you won’t know for a while. As my momma is fond of saying, it’s easier to add it than to take it out.

After your beans get to a rolling boil, you want to back off to a medium or low – whatever it takes to do a slow boil, just a bit more than a simmer. You want this to go on, with your pot covered, for about an hour, but stir the beans every 10-15 minutes. If you are doing other things, just do it as you pass through the kitchen – no need to set a timer or anything.

After your hour passes, turn it lower to a simmer and stir every so often. You will also need to check to make sure you don’t boil all your liquid away. I end up keeping a glass of water on the counter by the stove when I’m making beans, and I add a bit from time to time, always making sure to not drown them. Again, this isn’t soup. You want to keep an inch, no more than two, of water over the top of the beans.

Two hours in, check for salt, and most likely, add another half tablespoon. This is one of the danger points – too much salt makes them not fit to eat. By now, the broth is brown and has a filmy appearance to it as the meat and marrow dissolves into the bean juice and makes something amazing.

I don’t know how long this dish takes to make – there are a lot of variables. Fresher beans cook faster than older beans, and temperature settings like High and Medium are subjective. And I haven’t ever cooked on your stove. But between two and a half and three hours, take a couple of beans out and mash them between your fingers. If the bean splits in two, keep cooking. But a perfect bean will be slightly firm, and yet mash evenly between your fingers. Think of the difference between a raw potato and a baked potato. We are going for a baked potato here. If nobody is looking, you can eat a few and see how they taste. The meat will, by this time, have fallen off the bone and left it clean.

When you plate it up, make sure you put some meat pieces in each serving. The meat is very much part of this dish, as is the cornbread that traditionally is served with it. I like it in a bowl with lots of broth to sop up with my cornbread, but some folk like it on a plate. Either way, I am fond of putting some pickled green tomato relish (we call this relish chow-chow, but I understand people from north of here put cabbage in their chow-chow, and I don’t know how to feel about that.) on it, but my Dad always put pepper sauce on his. I knew one guy in the Marines that put ketchup on his beans – I never did trust that guy. Let your conscience be your guide.

You should, I am convinced, always have some dried beans in your pantry. Beans are cheap – a pound of pintos is roughly a dollar, give or take, and will feed six people. Four if they are hungry. They keep for ages. They are a wonderful source of protein. And they taste amazing.

You were probably with me up until that last sentence. But they do – correctly seasoned, like these are, beans are a miracle food that have kept many a poor person nourished and fed and happy. They are, done right, a poor man’s feast.