Today we served a crown rack of venison ribs with whole grilled onions, Nassau grits, several other virtually unrecognizable vegetables, hush-puppies and topped off with Armanac and chocolate cheese pie (amost as good as one I recently heard was recently served to a certain Bip, but maybe not quite...) Anyway, for those interested:

Jane Burbank's Hushpuppies
Printer version of this recipe
(this woman once is rumored to have fried 2000+ hushpuppies for a town supper in Fernandina Beach, Fla.)

This recipe will only make about thirty, more or less, enough to serve 4 or 5 normal people, less if you know the vultures I do...

1 cup self-rising corn meal
1/2 cup self-rising flour
1/2 cup pancake mix
(if you prefer regular flour, etc. in place of the self-rising type - meaning if you're a type A personality - then add a tablespoon baking powder and a teaspoon of salt to the dry ingredients)

Pinch salt
1/2 tsp sugar
1/4 fresh ground pepper
1 egg (a big 'un)
1 medium onion (of course - I'm a Cajun)
1/2 cup milk or so
Oil - or better fish drippings if you have them - for frying

combine all the dry ingredients in a bowl or something suitable; whisk the heck out of the egg in a measuring cup and the add the onion and enough milk to fill the cup to the 1-cup mark.

Mix the liquid stuff from the measuring cup into the dry ingredients till moist - if it don't work, add a little more milk.

Put oil/drippings in a real (black iron) frying-thingy, add enough oil to get about 1/4 inch in the thing; heat until it sizzles when you drop a little bit of the batter in... now comes the hard part....this is more art than science:

Drop a teaspoon of the batter in - if it spreads out like a pancake then it's too thin - add a tablespoon or two more of cornmeal ...if its too dry, then add a tablespoon or two of milk ....when it's right, then just go ahead and slop 8 or 10 of the little suckers in the fry pan and have at it, just don&t put so many in they overlap or touch one another (practice safe-frying...).

cook 3-4 minutes till lightly browned and turn and brown the other side for another 2 or 3 minutes. Drain on old newspaper or, if you&re the Type A personality mentioned above, clean paper towels, keeping hot while you attempt to cook the remaining batter, adding oil as needed - but only a little at a time to keep the temp up.

Yummmmmmmmm. You can actually hear your arteries
snap shut as you eat these.....

Find someone to clean up the kitchen.....