A great breakfast!

This morning I had some bottom-of-the-bags of cornmeal, brown sugar Southern seasoned grits, and rolled oats---not enough to make any one of them, but I decided to try mixing them together. Rolled oats are about as close to recycled cardboard as you're going to get, so if this hadn't worked I knew that I wouldn't be losing much except some time. What I did was mix them together with milk---two cups of milk for one cup of mix---and whisked them together in the milk for about 10 or 15 minutes as it cooked, adding a little water when they got dry and lumpy. I put on some butter and some J.T. Cooper roasted strawberry and black pepper cane sugar syrup when it was done.

Lately I have been saving my left-over coffee to make redeye gravy. You make that by frying a thick piece of ham with lots of fat on it, and when you have a good bit of drippings in the pan you remove the ham and put it some place where it can keep warm. I don't use the stove because the ham will get dry there unless its exceptionally good. Anyway, you then add some boiling black coffee to your pan with the drippings and scrape the sides of the pan to get every last bit of drippings. Get it boiling. And then you're done. You can put that over the ham, put a bit on buttermilk biscuits, add it to grits, whatever.

If you don't have a great piece of ham, you're going to want a bit of lard or butter.

I make my coffee in one of those old blue campfire coffee pots and I use the cheapest coffee that I can find. The coffee that I don't use for redeye gravy I run through the coffee pot the next day and the day after 'til it's gone or I've made more redeye gravy. Today I had a cup of true high-test with my mush.

Getting back to that mush, cornmeal mush was one of my favorite breakfasts as a child. My nonna (Italian grandmother) would make it early and I would wake up to that cooking in a cast-iron pan next to some strong black coffee that had been ground in a grinder brought over from Italy or up from Argentina and made in one of those little aluminum percolating pots. But my nonna's mush---we used the word "moza"---tasted much better than mine does. She had that coarse-ground cornmeal, fresh milk, a glava (stirring paddle), and a converted coal stove to cook with. And she had a grandmother's love, which is the best ingredient of all, isn't it? (Or "Ain't?" as the old people said as one sentence or question.)

That mush that I made this morning was great!

You can find J.T. Cooper Syrup from Floyd, Virginia for ordering right here.

You can find The Tiny House Southern Seasoned Grits for ordering right here.