Cooking a Sunshine Coast Feast!

On my night to cook over Christmas I went wild with Jamie Oliver's new cook book, Jamie's America, and made a few recipes from the book.

Rather than making a potato, pasta or rice salad I thought I'd do something a little bit different and made a cornbread for your daily quota of carbs. I've never made anything like it before and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was and very pleased with the result (apart from my baking paper getting stuck to the bottom). The leftovers were gobbled up for breakfast the next day with eggs and corned beef.

As an accompaniment I made a Mexican street salad (recipe is here). It wasn't massively different from a coleslaw, but instead of having a mayonnaise dressing, ours was made from lime and chili. It certainly involved a lot of chopping! The salad was good, but I should have put more chili into the dressing.

We had the corn bread and salad with a butterflied leg of lamb cooked on the BBQ.

For desert Penne cooked a peach cobbler. I don't think I've had a cobbler before. The fresh ripe peaches tasted delicious with some ice cream and cream (well it was Christmas). As far as I can tell a cobbler is just stewed fruit partly covered in a pastry like topping.

I don't have the Corn Bread recipe to hand, but it went something like:
Ingredients:
- 60g butter
- 2 onions
- 2 corn on the cob
- 325g of corn meal or polenta
- 250ml milk
- 6tbs of self raising flour
- 150g grated cheese
- 3 green chillies
- 2 eggs (it could have been 4, if you mix looks dry add more eggs)

Method:
- Slice the onions and cook them in the butter until golden.
- Slice all the kernels of corn off the cob and add them to the onions for 5mins once golden. Take of the heat to cool slightly.
- Finely chop two of the chilies and slice the other one.
- In a separate bowl mix the corn meal, milk, eggs, flour, two thirds of the cheese and chopped chillies. Then add in the onions and corn. You should have quite a thick batter.
- Spoon into a lined cake tin and scatter the sliced chili over the top.
- Bake at 180 degrees for 35mins. Ten minutes before the end, scatter over the remaining cheese.