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[SJC <indexer AT localnet.com>]

toni eddleman wrote:
>     As i buy Hominy regularly, i sure would like to start making it here.
>  Do you do that still?  We just had a wonderful soup the last two days -
>   
I made that post in response to one of  James'.  In his he described how 
he makes hominy.  Easy to miss a post in the muddle recently so in case 
you pitched it already here's what he does:

> Hominy is made from two things:  corn (of cousrse) and lime water.

> Lime water can be made by adding any form of dehydrated lime to water.  
> Sources of dehydrated lime are agricultural lime, pickling lime, 'cal' from a 
> Mexican 'tienda'.  You can also make your own by burning limestone.  Just build a 
> hot hardwood fire over some pieces of limestone. The carbondioxide is driven 
> from the calcium carbonate leaving calcium oxide ... CaCO3 -->  Ca0 + C02.  
> Caclcium oxide is also known as burnt lime.  Limestone will contain some percent 
> of Magnesium Carbonate which by the same process will leave you with Magnesium 
> Oxide, and it's just about as good.

> Put couple of table spoons of  the lime (calcium oxide) ub a gallon of cold 
> water.  It will form calcium hydroxide solution to saturation and any inert or 
> left over material will percipitate to the bottom.  Pour off the very slighly 
> cloudy water, this is what is listed on the list of ingredients of some foods 
> as 'lime water.'

> Put the dry corn kernals in a pot, preferably glass or enamal, and cover them 
> by a couple of inches with the lime water and bring to a boil.  Then let is 
> sit overnight.  The corn will swell and the hull around each kernal will 
> dissolve away.  

> Rinse the corn with cold water to remove any remaining calcium hydroxide and 
> any bits of hull not completely dissolved.

> This is hominy!   A little salt and perhaps pepper and there you are.

> From this point you can can the hominy so you can just open a jar in a hurry 
> and have a vegetalbe.  Pressure can same as with any veggie.

> You can dry the hominy and later just add boiling water to reconsitute.  
> There is a traditional Cherokee recipe where you crack some of those very small 
> hickory nuts but don't even try to remove the tiny nutmeats.  Put the broken 
> nuts in a bag and boil this with the dried hominy.  Very good!

> You can coarsely grind the dried hominy and you have hominy grits.

> Squashing the freshly made hominy with a 'matate' or the like, or else 
> running it through one of those cheapie Corona mills (for which it is purposely 
> designed), then mixing the mashed up hominy with equal parts water gives you 
> 'masa' from which you make tortillas and tamales.

> There are lots of variations of this.  The Hopi bread, 'piki', is made by 
> first grinding the corn into meal and then mixing it with wood ashes (which 
> contain potassium oxide and calcium oxide).

> All from corn, and all easily made in the homestead kitchen. 
_______________________________________________

Does sound tasty, not?

And I guess we must have just always kept it outside because the other 
grain was out.  Good idea to keep it in jars, as that's the way I keep a 
lot of things now anyway and have my shelves all sized for the gallons.  
It freezes on the porch in the winter so that holds down a lot of the 
wiggly critters.  I have a cold box built out there with door through to 
kitchen so in spring, fall, winter, don't need to run the fridge.  
Wouldn't have to in the summer but do love my dairy, so I do, but just a 
very small one.  I'm hoping that when I get moved I can get another of 
the sort I had before the fire, forgotten the name now, but took hardly 
any power compared to most, solar panels could easily manage it.  That 
way I had the freezer on the bottom and that was really handy in the 
summertime.

Anyway, enjoy your hominy.  It's a nice chore, as no hard-and-fast 
schedule with it, so it fits in nicely with the flow of fall days.

Susan Jane, in Maine