Getting Off My Butt To Make Cornbread

There is one problem with self challenges.  It may not be a problem for other people, but it is for me, and that problem is that my mind will obsess about it.  It is like a hamster wheel that just keeps spinning for no other reason than just to spin.  I realized over the weekend that it had been a month and a half since I had truly tried a recipe from my Cook Book Challenge.  I disgust myself at times.  The recipes in the books won't cook themselves.  Then to top it off I gained two more cookbooks during Christmas. My mother had a good laugh as I opened up a cookbook on homemade candy bars and another book on canning.  I would groan and call uncle on this whole challenge, but I am at the half way point and there is plenty of time to catch up. 

In the name of catching up, and because I am compelled by good manners to offer to bring something to a get together, and also because I do truly like to putz around the kitchen, I offered to bring something to the annual girlfriend gift exchange.  This is where a good majority of my girl friends get together and exchange presents and catch up with each other after a nice long holiday. Eat, Drink some more and be merry are all part of the experience. 

Too Lazy to Flip this Picture

Lizzy hosted it this year, and a hearty winter soup was part of the menu.  I don't know about most people, but I do love a chunk of bread to go with soup, so I volunteered to bring bread for the meal. In my head, I was going to do this fancy braided bread that looked really awesome and probably was going to take half a day to accomplish. That was the original plan, then I realized that I had to work over the weekend, and complicated braided bread was not something I was going to have time for. 

In fact, I was seriously debating on a quick run to the grocer to pick up french bread or table bread, but the monologue in my brain would not shut up. In fact the monologue got quite vicious, stating that if I had time to play games on my phone, then I had time to bake bread. 

Flipping through the book, The Art of Bread by Cooking Club of America I settled upon Classic Corn Bread.  Corn Bread goes with almost everything, and the recipe looked almost like every other recipe that I have seen of corn bread.  With a lot of mental berating and very little skill, I toss a corn bread batter in the oven and flounced off to run a brush through my hair and find a shirt that didn't have flour on it, so that I would be ready to go when the corn bread was ready. 

The gift exchange was fun, and thankfully the corn bread was a success. It didn't do all the horrible things that I thought it would in my mind, which mostly consisted of it not solidifying in the center or being dry.  It was also successful in the fact that it got the internal monologue to shut up for once, and compelled me to start looking at some of the cookbooks I still have on the list. Yay for small victories.