The call of the cornstalks makes recipe a must-fix

I never could understand it. My mother would gaze on all the chocolate-laden desserts on display in the cafeteria dessert line and swiftly pass them up, along with the seductive coconut pie with the three-inch-high meringue and the apple cobbler with its sugar-dusted lattice top. She'd ignore the tangy lemon cream pie with the frothy whipped-cream topping. She'd even turn her nose up at the four-layer carrot cake decked with cute little carrots crafted with orange icing.

What, instead did she pick?

Bread pudding, of course. The most prosaic of all choices, and she'd select it every time. Pudding with bread? Wasn't a dinner roll enough? I shook my head in puzzlement as I hastily pulled some chocolate three-layer decadence onto my tray.

Maturity among the taste buds did its work on me. Now, what's my first choice in the cafeteria line (provided one can still locate a cafeteria!)? Bread pudding, of course. I've become a bread-pudding-aholic. These days I’m crazy for it. I have recipes for every variety known. In my first cookbook, Way Back in the Country Garden, Pumpkin Bread Pudding got the nod. In my new cookbook, Way Back in the Country Garden, Apple Bread Pudding, made with fresh apples, got rave reviews. Chocolate Bread Pudding is another hands-down favorite of mine.

I now consider bread pudding of any variety to be the dessert of royalty. Mother, I take it all back. Mothers are always right.

Perhaps that's why the recipe for Fresh Corn Bread Pudding caught my eye and made it to my "must-try" list. (Earlier I mentioned that I'm cooking my way through my wish-list of recipes that have been gathering dust in my binder for numerous seasons. Corn Bread Pudding is one that I repeatedly bypassed but promised myself to prepare.)

It was billed as a cross between corn pudding and cornbread. Most importantly it calls for fresh corn cut from the cob. While we're waiting for our own garden's cornstalks to get as high as an elephant's eye (looks like maybe about three weeks to go), we found a good deal on corn at our Kroger this week. Corn Bread Pudding (from a long-ago Family Circle magazine) was a great way to use a bunch of it quickly.

This delightful concoction is sweet enough to be mistaken for dessert, but it also makes a terrific side dish as well as an almost-bread serving. My hubby and I even served it to ourselves as a main course alongside a colorful vegetable salad. For my daughter, who slathers ketchup on most everything, Corn Bread Pudding is certainly ketchup-worthy. And for last night's meal I dressed it up with a little sour cream/dill sauce that I had prepared for another entree. What a great combination!

Corn Bread Pudding, with three cups of corn kernels in it, is plenty fibrous, moist, and sweet. But best of all, before too many days I can walk out my door a few steps, visit my elephant's-eye-high cornstalks, and prepare it from fresh ingredients found in my own back yard!

Fresh Corn Bread Pudding

3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

1/2 cup cornmeal

2 tablespoons sugar (or sugar substitute)

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt (or salt substitute)

2 cups buttermilk (or 4 1/2 teaspoons vinegar with enough milk added to make 2 cups)

4 large eggs (or egg substitute)

3 cups fresh corn kernels cut from 4 to 6 ears

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 7-inch-by-11-inch baking dish. In a large bowl whisk together the cornmeal, sugar, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl. Pulse buttermilk, eggs, and 3 tablespoons melted butter in a blender or food processor until smooth. Add corn and pulse a few more times (the mixture should be lumpy with visible kernels). Whisk buttermilk mixture into cornmeal mixture. Pour into prepared baking dish; bake 35 to 40 minutes until edges are golden brown and center remains slightly jiggly. Transfer to a rack to cool. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Good health (and skinny-ness, for at least one person) begins in the garden

These days my hubby is a shadow of his former self—high-school skinny once again—and he credits everything to his dining on garden yield.

No pre-packaged diet meals or commercialized weight-loss programs were involved in this major shedding of pounds (33 of them, to be exact.)

He's simply replaced twice-a-week McDonald's large chocolate milkshakes with homemade fruit smoothies made with nonfat yogurt and any kind of fruit he might happen to have in the refrigerator.

He's subbed snacking on cookies with munching on apple slices and carrot sticks.

What's more, he will tell you that he's never eaten so well in all his life nor enjoyed his meals any more robustly.

I agree with him wholeheartedly; in support of his new plan to become svelte, I've lost 20 pounds myself. (When you're a short person, many people presume you don't have weight to shed, but I was quietly accumulating a sizable closet section of pants and dresses that I could no longer wear. I'm proud to say that, now, EVERYTHING fits once again. I couldn't be more thrilled.)

Vanity on my husband's part had no part in bringing on this new look, although I'll be the first to say I think he's truly a "hottie" now that he's all lean and trim. (Resuming jogging for 2 1/2 miles a day and regular gym workouts had a role also.)

A scary bloodtest report last November--particularly in the area of high triglycerides, high cholesterol, and blood-pressure out the roof--made a believer out of him fast. A nutritionist provided by the Chickasaw Nutrition Services reviewed his daily food intake and told him to jettison his vices (such as a dab of coffee served in his sea of French Vanilla creamer, if you know what I mean) or possibly face diabetes in the very near future.

All this happened at the same time I was accumulating recipes for my new book, Way Back in the Country Garden, which features foods prepared from fresh produce--recipes that have been in my family for generations as well as new ones. I was needing to taste-test many of these items, so I began trying them out for our family meals. Most recipes are health-conscious and feature foods that are garden-fresh--those food groupings we're supposed to have 5-to-9 servings of every day. This taste-test need coincided perfectly with his (make that OUR) need to revise our eating habits.

Our meals began including such items as Vegetable Quesadillas (see recipe below), Zesty Penne and Broccoli, Spinach and Mushroom Frittata, Turkey Cabbage Stew, Hot Bacon and Black-Eyed Pea Salad, White Bean Salad with Asparagus, and Zucchini and Tomato Galette, to name a few. Insane as it sounds, we became so enraptured in experimenting with these delicious new dishes that we lost our interest in eating out (well, no woman ever truly turns down an opportunity to dine away from home, but I at least got sidetracked for the cause of healthy food preparation.)

Six months after that horrifying pre-Thanksgiving physical: my husband's bloodwork recently showed massive drops in all the right areas, with his triglycerides impressively down from 229 t0 52! (from higher than high to low normal). Last week his doctor was agog at the lean specimen who appeared at his office--mainly because Hubby actually paid attention to doctor's orders. "Most people don't ever listen to me when I tell them they must lose weight," the physician murmured as he shook his head in surprise.

I wish I could tell you that we always make lemonade out of life's lemons, but this is one crisis that turned into a gift--the gift of good health, plus an extraordinary new recipe collection. I only lament the fact that my new, growing untried recipe collection for foods from the garden has expanded so, I'll probably still be clicking them off many physicals from now.

Vegetable Quesadillas

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 large green pepper, cored and chopped

8 ounces sliced mushrooms

1/8 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon pepper

8 fajita-sized flour tortillas (7-inch diameter)

1 1/3 cups shredded pepperjack cheese

2 medium ears corn, steamed and cut from cob, enough to make 1 1/4 cups fresh corn kernels

In a large, nonstick skillet heat 2 tablespoons olive oil. Add green pepper, mushrooms, salt, and pepper. Saute over medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until green pepper softens. Stir occasionally. Remove from heat. Place flour tortillas on a flat work surface. Place about 1/3 cup pepperjack cheese over each tortilla. Top each with another tortilla. Wipe out skillet; coat with nonstick cooking spray and heat over medium-high heat. Place 1 quesadilla in the skillet. Cook 2 minutes. Gently press down with a spatula. Turn and cook an additional 1 to 2 minutes until quesadilla is slightly browned and cheese melts. Remove from skillet. Keep quesadillas warm. Repeat process with remaining quesadillas. To serve heat corn. Cut each quesadilla into wedges and serve with the corn. Serves 4.