Updates on Cornbread!

Yes, my friends, this is a happy day, for the rice-cooker cornbread worked! Actually that would be the other day that was happiest, because I've eaten all the cornbread by now and need to go and buy more ingredients if I want to make another, but here are the promised pictures:

Fresh out of the ... cooker. I dumped it upside down in order to turn it over, because the top wasn't quiiite finished.

And here it is! Delicious... probably because I measured the sugar by sight.

Syrup on warm cornbread, straight from the... cooker. Mmmm.

Now that I've made you all jealous, here's how I did it:

1 cup corn grits
1/3 cup rice flour
2/3 cup corn flour
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1/3 vegetable oil
1 egg

Mix the dry ingredients in one bowl, the wet in another, then combine and stir until there are no lumps. Pop it in the rice cooker and press the button for plain ol' rice. You can do away with the rice and corn flour by adding 1 cup of plain, all-purpose flour instead if you're not worried about gluten.

It takes about 45 minutes-ish for the rice setting to beep that it's done - I dumped the bread out, turned it upside down, and put it back in on the keep-warm setting (it comes on automatically after the rice is done) to cook the bit at the top that wasn't quite done yet, and that took about 10-15 minutes. So really, you can have cornbread in under an hour, and the best thing about the rice cooker is that it doesn't heat up the apartment when you use it.

On a slightly unrelated note, I managed to make it to the gym on Friday, and it was quite the experience. The man on staff in the excercise room spoke no English, and I only understood about five percent of his Japanese, so we communicated mainly by gesticulating and speaking in katakana. There was only one other foreigner in the gym that I noticed; the rest were mainly older Japanese folk doing group yoga and stretches or making use of the machines. I used the Japanese elliptical! Next Friday: Japanese weight-lifting.