whitefish hushpuppies

One major drawback to living in a place like Northern Michigan is that there are no hushpuppies.  Oh sure, a handful of restaurants in the area claim to serve hushpuppies but, as it turns out, those things are not hushpuppies.  I’m not sure what they are, but trust me when I tell you that they’re not hushpuppies. Hushpuppies — so named for their power to quiet the barking dogs of hunters and fishermen gathered around their campfires or of Confederate soldiers hoping to prevent Union scouts from discovering their campfires or of fugitive slave hunters attempting to thwart runaway slaves’ passage along the Underground Railroad or, well, nobody really knows for sure — have long been a staple of Southern cuisine. They’re hot, delicious little morsels of fried cornmeal dough, golden-crisp on the outside and densely bready on the inside.  In the South, they’re a standard accompaniment to just about everything from barbecue sandwiches to crabcakes; in the Midwest, if you want a hushpuppy you’ll have to make it yourself.

chicken on the cheap

If you own a television and are not particularly speedy with the remote, you’ve probably seen the commercial in which KFC glibly suggests that the only way to feed a family of four for under $10 is to buy them a bucket of fast food chicken. My initial response, after watching the TV mom and her two children zip through the grocery feigning shock at the price of such thrifty staples as a bag of flour, was to demand of KFC, ‘If I can’t cook it for $10, how can you?”

It was a rhetorical question, of course.  For one thing, I was talking to the TV, plus I have a reasonable grasp on economies of scale.  More importantly, I’ve read enough of the modern-day muckrakers to know that fast food is made possible by farming subsidies and cheap oil, and that the industry relies on exploitatively cheap labor and unsustainable factory farming to manufacture its sleazy product at bargain-basement prices.

But once I finished angrily lecturing the television — which had long since moved on to flushable toilet brushes or some other such nonsense — it occurred to me that not only could I cook that for $10, I could cook something much better using (mostly) local ingredients.  And since we’d already invited Chris’s aunt and uncle to dinner, I figured last night was as good an opportunity as any to prove the Colonel wrong.