Baked Hominy and Tomatoes (Gluten Free)

This dish is actually made from hominy grits, not whole hominy as the title might lead one to expect. Hominy grits make a very tasty, versatile side dish. Dress them up with lots of cheese, and maybe canned tomatoes, and you can't go wrong. I decided to serve ham because the yms like ham, and because I needed a ham bone for a soup recipe. Hominy casseroles go well with ham, and everybody likes cheese.
The only potentially tricky element to this recipe is estimating the correct amount of uncooked grits you need to produce the three cups of cooked grits needed for the recipe. I listened to some helpful advice from a kitchen elf and made a monumental amount of grits, three times what was necessary.  Grits are like rice. You use half of the uncooked produce to make the correct amount of cooked produce. To get three cups of cooked grits, cook one and a half cups of raw grits in three cups of water.
My husband Bob and I had been at church working on the rummage sale, so we did not prepare ahead of time. This is an easy recipe, but it does take time, about 20 minutes to cook the grits, and 45 minutes to bake the casserole. We ended up eating just as the World Series came on. Like I said, grits, cheese and tomatoes--you can't go wrong.

Baked Hominy and Tomatoes

3 cups canned or homecooked hominy grits
1 tablespoon butter
2 cups canned tomatoes or tomato puree
1/4 cup grated sharp Cheddar cheese
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
2. Combine the hominy, butter, tomatoes, and cheese. Add the salt and pepper and pour into an oiled baking dish or casserole.
3. Bake about forty-five minutes.
Makes eight servings.

Dirty Rice (Gluten Free)

Dirty Rice, from Louisiana, is described in one of Hewitt's rare notes as a jambalaya. Well, I don't know about that- My ever present source, Wikipedia, says that there are two kinds of jambalaya, creole jambalaya and Cajun jambalaya. Both of these dishes contain what the Wikipedia writer refers to as "the Trinity," onions, celery and green or red peppers. Dirty Rice ain't got no red peppers or celery, so what do you say about that?
I say, cooking was so boring in Hewitt's time that the New Orleans matrons who gave her their recipes probably thought that red peppers and celery were "common" or made the dish "too rich." To compare this to a jambalaya is like Calvin Trillin, one of the more hilarious writers in print, talking about being invited  to see a trio of white dentists playing what was supposedly Dixieland Jazz. (If you want to track down this reference yourself, it was either in American Fried or Alice, Let's Eat.)
My son requested a ham for Easter dinner. Bob ordered one from Edwards of Surrey, Va. These are terrific, authentic smoked hams, and are even semi local. I prefer to truck up to Eastern Market to Union Meat. Bob prefers to order things and be done with it.
I decided dirty rice would go well with the ham and would probably be okay with the less adventurous eaters around the table. I had to leave one of the ingredients out from the git go. The recipe calls for a quarter of a pound of chicken gizzards. These are not particularly easy to find. One Christmas, when I was making a concerted effort to track down gizzards for pate, I finally ran them to earth at Safeway after inquiring at several specialty shops. If I had gone to the Eastern Market, I probably could have found them there, but I left shopping until Friday afternoon, and Safeway was without them.
I made the rice after we got home from Easter Sunday services. The directions didn't exactly work, especially not in the time allowed by the two family schedule of my son and his wife and her mother. We are lucky that all the families live within an hour of each other, but it does mean that meals have to be served on time because half the guests have to go on to some other event.
The recipe says the cook is to simmer the rice for exactly 15 minutes. Then, one sautés everything else in a saucepan and adds it all to the partially cooked rice and broth. The resulting semi-soup is then baked at 350 degrees for 15 more minutes. If you follow these directions, what  you have is still soupy rice with chicken livers, etc.  floating in it.. Bob plunked the baking dish on top of a burner and jacked up the flame until most of the liquid was absorbed. The result was delicious, but somewhat ...gummy.
If I was truly an inspiring cook, I would make this again, experimenting until I achieved the desired effect before I wrote about it. But, I never promised you readers a rose garden, only a strange tour through mid-twentieth century American cooking. I leave the experimenting to you.
Personally, if I were to make this again, I would cook the rice longer to begin with, and definitely bake it longer, at least half an hour.
How does this taste? Good, but somewhat bland for our twenty-first century taste buds. Try to use bacon fat. I didn't have any and so used cooking oil. Bacon fat would add richness.

Dirty Rice

2 cups uncooked rice
6 cups chicken broth
1 bay leaf
1 cup finely chopped onions
2 tablespoons bacon drippings
1/4 pound chicken livers
1/4 pound chicken gizzards
1 clove garlic
3/4 cup finely chopped scallions, including the green part
1/2 cup finely chopped parsley
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
butter

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Place the rice in a one-and-one-half-quart saucepan and add four cups broth and the bay leaf. Cover, bring to boil and simmer exactly fifteen minutes.
3. Cook the onions in the blackened drippings until almost brown Chop the livers and gizzards fine and add them. Cook, stirring, until brown. Add the garlic, onions and parsley. Season with salt and pepper and add the remaining broth. Combine the partially cooked rice and the chicken giblet mixture and pour all into a baking pan. Dot with butter and bake fifteen minutes. (See notes)
Makes six servings.

1.

Cheese Grits Casserole

On Sunday, the YMs, our friend Tim, Bob's old colleague and friend Kathleen  and my brother George came to dinner. I decided to have Southern dinner, especially because the New England choices are kind of thin. Tim, who comes from Alabama, was especially pleased.
"I like to know what I'm eating," he said. Apparently, he doesn't always know what he's eating when he comes to our house.
Since the beans had to cook or set for hours, I started them around 2:00. About 5:00, it was time for the grits. I had had my eye on this recipe for several weeks, since I bought the grits for something else. I bought several iterations of sharp cheddar cheese that got eaten or made into some other dish. However, when I opened the cookbook, I couldn't find it. My eyes fell instead on a recipe for grits souffle. I started the grits with the intention of making the souffle. Immediately, I sensed a problem. The directions on the grits box tell you how to make various numbers of servings, not, how many cups of uncooked grits one needs to produce a certain number of cups of cooked grits.
Since time was passing, I winged it. I figured that if one cup of uncooked rice and two cups of water produce two cups of cooked rice, something like that would work for grits. It did. I put two cups of grits and four cups of water in the saucepan. Then I came to my senses . This dish had cheese in it, I said to myself.   I  looked in the index. I hadn't been able to find Cheese Grits Casserole because it was under main dishes at the end, with cheese concoctions.
I scraped the large amount of grits out of the sauce pan into a greased baking dish, mixed in everything but the beaten egg white and set it off to the side while I went to work on the fried chicken. I am not giving you the recipe because I made it once before, sometime in the 1980s. When the chicken was soaking in the milk, I went back to the grits. My husband Bob beat the egg white with a whisk. For some reason I had reached the state of malaise, or fatigue that made taking out the hand beater too much effort.  The whole thing went into the oven and came out onto the plates of the delighted diners.
My son pronounced grits much better as a side dish than as a breakfast food. I have to say I agree. The first time I encountered them was on a ski trip for teenagers in Vermont. I thought it was cream of wheat and put milk and sugar on them. Cheese and butter makes virtually anything downright tasty.

Cheese Grits Casserole

5 cups water
1 cup hominy grits (I used regular grits. I prefer not to use quick cooking anything.)
1/2 pound sharp cheddar cheese, grated
1/2 cup butter
1 egg separated
1 teaspoon salt

1. Bring the water to a boil and gradually stir in the grits. Simmer, covered, twenty five to thirty minutes, stirring often.
2. Stir in the cheese and butter until melted. Spoon a little of the hot mixture not the egg yolk, return to the bulk of the mixture, add the salt and mix. Cool to room temperature.
3 Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
4. Beat the egg white until stiff but not dry and fold into the cooled mixture. Spoon mixture into a greased baking dish and bake, covered, forty minutes. Remove cover, turn oven heat to 375 degrees and bake until top of casserole is slightly browned.
Makes six servings.