Hi I'm Betty. Welcome to Betty’s kitchen. Tonight I'm making soup beans with ham and corn bread for dinner. And the reason I’d choose to show you this is I have a lot of request lately for some kind of meal, a complete meal that is nutritious, it has to be quick to make and has to be easy to make and has to be easy on the budget. And I had a several people that I don’t know work for send trying to save a little money here and there. They don’t really have time a lot of time to do cooking, I had students contact me and said what would be, what would fit all of those categories. and what it came out is soup beans and corn bread. And if you’re from the region where I live, you know you can go on any Cracker barrel restaurant and you'll find soup beans and corn bread on the menu. So it’s kind of popular around here I don’t know how this in the rest of the country, but lets get started.
Now we’re going to do this with can beans and I’ve chosen Pinto Bake. Just for demonstration purposes we’re going to use the can beans and show you how quickly you can come up with a complete meal that is very innutritious, very easy to do and it also should be easy on the budget. I'm going to put some ham in, you can leave this out or you might use that goya ham flavored seasoning that I mention when we we’re doing green beans. What I've chosen here is Hormel lean smoke ham so it doesn’t have a lot of calories that you might expect with ham seasoning, but it does give the dish a little bit extra taste. So I like to use it instead of just the seasoning mix. We have 5 ounces here in this can and I already taken a sharp knife and going trough and kind the made a grid pattern on it, so when it comes out it should be in cubes. And it has some juice with it, we want to save that ham a juice because that’s a little flavor as well and you can see I chopped it up so it can be spread out trough out the beans.
Now the beans just going to pour those in, this is not much of a recipe it just maybe a reminder, I called it a reminder of something that you might have done in the past that you have forgotten it and you look doesn’t think, that does not so bad I got the soup beans and corn bread. So we’ll get this started by just stirring this up a little bit, you want to use all of that liquid of the beans and your chopped ham should be chunk enough that you see it separate like this. And when you get it like that just go ahead and put on the stove all ingredients heating but it doesn’t matter if you cook it for awhile, its very flexible. So will just turn it on low and let it sit there before we start our corn bread.
And now I'm going corn bread from scratch, I've made corn sticks for you and I think I made corn muffins for you. So this time I'm going to put it in a pan that is a, I think this eight inches square. It’s a pan, it could be eight inch square or nine inch square, either way what would work fine for you. But the ingredients I'm going to use to my corn bread, I’ll start with flour, I've got three quarters of a cup. Now the amount of flour that I use determines how much corm meal mix I'm going to put with it, trough the flour it is self rising. The corn meal mix, here is the container it come off I just dumped this in a big glass jar, usually I'm put a liter on it just to keep nice and fresh but this is the container that came in. Its self rising corn meal, it doesn’t said mix but its corn meal mix and I’m using twice as much as I did on the flour. So that use 3 quarters a cup of flour I need one and one half cups of corn meal mix, so those two things are the main ingredients here. With this much and you can make any size as you want just keep that proportion going. But with this much I'm going to use two eggs.
When I make about half this much I’ll just use one egg. Let’s just crack the egg and put it in here and a second egg and then I want stir this up but its going to be very sticky and make it gummy kind of dough if I don’t put some of my milk can. I don’t know how much milk this is going to take but what I do is I have two cups measured out here. I will put in what I think it needs or just some to start with. And there's a certain look that it has and you just have to learn to look for that but I will take in terms of measurement when I get to it. But I will be continuing to add you can see it, its way to dry just spread into a dish so more milk. This is skimmed milk you can use any type of milk that you like just stir this around. You really want to stir this just enough to get it blended properly but with the right consistency.
I like it just a little thinner than that and it’s not the exact science. If you put a little too much a little too little as compared to what I have here it’s not going to make much difference. If you have your corn bread batter ready for the pan this is what its look like. It’s nice and fluid and the egg is been combined in there so it’s ready for the pan. However there is a trick that I do on the pan and I didn’t think about it but I probably we had a problem if I had because this is going to the oven and be heated and probably it will over heat by now. You don’t want it to be smoke you put it in 475 degree oven and we will be baking this in 475 degree which is very hot. So I'm going to put this in the over right now and as soon as it get hot but not smoking I'm going to put this batter in and I will be baking it, and will be taking maybe 15 to20 minutes of the timer and I will let you know the time.
I'm putting my pan in the oven nice and heated and I didn’t tell you how much milk I use, I just looked and it was one cup. So I will be back when the corn bread is done because I'm going to wait for that to heat and put the mix on it.
I just got my soup beans on the stove and I'm pouring it in a nice serving dish and I’m going to throw this and I’ve just gotten the corn bread out of the oven. My test for done in the corn bread is take a toothpick and put down the center and comes out clean which is does and its done. So what we’re going to do is cut a piece of corn bread it’s going to take a minute to do that. So let me comeback and I’ll show to serve you on this plate. I served my self with some of the soup beans so from this larger bowl would just put a little bit in here. Now you could cook this down and tell this is very dry, you can have very liquid there to be thick and as fine as you like to have them so here we have the nice big serving and then to go with it we want some of this bread. The corn bread I’ve cut into 16 squares, four squares four cuts on the side and could see what its look like top and bottom. It’s hot so let’s take the next one coming along down there. Have a couple of squares here and what goes great with that is some fresh batter so I'm going to cut a little bit of butter and just put it on the plate so we have available to me.
So I got my meal, here are my soup beans with my spoon and here is my corn bread to go with it. On the soup beans I'm going to put a sprinkling of onions, you may like this and you may not so that’s just to an individuals taste, and I have a glass of milk to drink. Made me a super wholesome meal and then to cut down on that wholesomeness, got the brownie pudding that we made earlier today. So if you haven’t seen the brownie pudding you might be interested looking that up. But this is my complete meal and its cost affective, it’s quick and easy and I think you’re going to enjoy it.