Bacon for breakfast is a treat. Not an everyday thing, but especially welcome when there's a day of gardening ahead, or something more strenuous than sitting in front of the computer. Crisp, smoky, salty, sweet and finger-lickin' good, bacon is damn near irresistible. (Especially if you know for a fact that it doesn't come from a pig raised in misery on a feed lot.) And boy does it go well with corn. Corn, bacon and avocado salad. Corn pudding with bacon. Cornbread with crispy pork cracklings. After last week's rather esoteric grits posting that involved draining and drying your grits before eating, I thought it might be a good idea to share a recipe that's a little less involved. I was ordering buckwheat and brown rice flours from Anson Mills to do some gluten-free baking, and I also picked up a bag of their coarse-ground Pencil Cob brits—so-called for the very slim corn cob. I simply boiled them with water, stirred in a little cream, some sharp cheddar and a handful of minced jalapeño and there was breakfast. A couple of slices of bacon fried to perfection and it became a breakfast of champions. So if you were daunted by my purple Forbidden Rice grits, these should send you racing to the stove.
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In my quest to offer you more alternatives to the dreaded, over-processed, denatured, cardboard-like breakfast cereals we should all be rejecting forever, I hereby tempt you with a delicious bowl of nutty, nutritious and quite comforting grits. As you can see, I've gotten all fancy with purple rice and, though you need not be so esoteric, I highly recommend you source your grits from somewhere like Bob's Red Mill or Anson Mills. Both offer a variety of organic heirloom rices and grains, all painstakingly milled and very fresh. The taste really illustrates the difference, as does the quality of the nutrition you get from products like these. Please don't feed your kids (or yourself) instant oats or Rice Krispies or cornflakes when you can give them healthy, whole foods instead. And grits are a great vehicle for other flavors, like soft-cooked eggs, crispy bacon, spicy Tabasco, creamy yogurt, maple syrup, strawberry jam, cultured butter—pretty much anything tastes good plopped on top of or stirred into this yummy bowl of mush. This particular bowl I ate with a dollop of crème fraîche and some crunchy smoked sea salt.
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