1 TBS fresh oregano, or 1 tsp dried
2 lbs prepared posole
2 lbs lean pork diced
Garnish:
1 head cabbage, very thinly sliced
12 radishes sliced thin
1/2 cup red chile or ranchero sauce
Simmer broth ingredients in water 6-8 hours, skimming to remove excess fat and scum the
first 2 hrs. Strain, reserve stock. Remove meat from pigs feet and return to stock.
Add posole, pork, oregano. Simmer 4-5 hrs, adding more water as needed, and skimming.
Remove garlic head, taste for salt. Ladle soup and fixings into large bowls, garnish with
cabbage, radishes, ranchero sauce, and if fresh oregano is availabl, a sprig of that.Making hominy
I have no way to get wood (oak) ashes (and I think the southwestern kind is made in
limewater), I'll give this recipe which was used up north 20 years or so ago, somebody try it
with store-bought popcorn or health food co-op dried corn, see if it works, if you can get the
ashes.
This is the method for making hominy from traditionally sun-dried corn as done up north on
Ojibwe reservations here for many years. It's from Ona Kingbired ( Red Lake). I've never
tried it.
Use sun-dried corn. But I'd like to know if dried pop-corn grain will work. Multicolored
kernels have the most flavor.
Put 2 double-handfuls of ash from oak, maple or poplar wood fires into about 2-3 quarts of
water. Boil for 1 hour and let it set all night to settle the ash out. In the morning, boil dried
corn in this water, strained if necessary, until the skins slip off and the corn turns bright
yellow (1-2 hours).. Rinse 3 times in fresh water. This fresh hominy can now be used
immediately in soups and stews. The dried corn will absorb 3-4 times its volume of water.
Hominy can also be dried for storage and cooked again (it swells up about 4 times and
absorbs at least 4 times its quantity of water).
So, I'd like to hear from someone who can try this with wood ash and the kind of dried corn
you can get in stores.
Southwestern tribes made hominy by cooking the dried corn kernels in a lye water made
from a mix of corn-cob ashes and powdered lime in water, I'm informed. Either way, the net
effect on the nutritional value of the corn is that while some nutrients are leached out, those
weren't in available forms anyway. The treatment greatly increases the amounts of usable
protein, usable vitamin B (especially thiamine, rarest among vegetable sources), and adds a
considerable amount of usable calcium and potassium to the resulting food. (This is
probably not true of the way factory-canned hominy is made.) If corn is the staple of your
diet, it is hominy you will mostly eat. White people were unaware of this, because relatively
little scientific attention was given to nutrition, and no scientists were willing to learn from
so-called primitive people with their so-called irrational customs. In the 1920's and '30's,
there was widespread pellagra among poor whites, especially in the south. Pellagra is a
serious, eventually fatal, disease caused entirely by nutritional deficiences that arise fromNative Foods -- Recipes--Corn
http://www.kstrom.net/isk/food/r_corn.html (4 of 9) [5/17/2004 11:52:07 AM]