Tamale pie

Lately I've been gravitating toward cooking what I consider comfort foods, which basically means at least one of the following things and more often than not a combination of the three: foods I ate in my childhood, foods my mom makes, or hearty, simple, often fatty foods. Since I'm only able to replicate a couple of the dishes my mom makes, it's really more of the first and third qualities that show up in comfort foods I cook. Comfort foods are a bit of a challenge in summer since hot weather doesn't lend itself to rich, hearty foods, but sometimes I just say weather be damned! Even though summer is ending, I would love to get anyone's idea of more summer-appropriate comfort foods. (Cold sesame noodles maybe?)

My parents have a microwave that I'm pretty sure is older than me, but amazingly, it still works. With this microwave came a microwave cookbook with lots of pretty, nice-looking pictures. I picked it up one day as a kid and the thought of being able to cook meals in a microwave really appealed to me-- some of the recipes seemed the height of sophistication--and that cookbook started me on the track of getting more and more interested in cooking. The recipes were mostly basically American dishes and stuff like "teriyaki chicken wings," and growing up in a household where home-cooked Chinese food was the norm, these recipes not only sounded tasty, they also had an exotic appeal. This includes microwaved meat loaf.

My most recent foray into comfort food is tamale pie, which I made once as a kid from the microwave cookbook in my very early days of cooking. I quite liked it and only made it once, but recently I was leafing through a Cook's Illustrated cookbook and found a recipe for tamale pie. All these tasty memories came back to me. Reading through the Cook's Illustrated recipe, I also thought it sounded tasty and most certainly sounded like it would be better than the microwave cookbook version.

The cornbread topping is delicious. I'm pretty sure it's mostly due to the higher proportion of butter to everything else in this recipe than in other cornbread recipes I've seen, but the cornbread came out a little crisp, tender, and with the most amazing flavor of corn. The filling was also delicious. Fresh corn cut from the cob was my concession to summer, beans, ground beef, beans, garlic, onions, and spices. The other appealing factor is that the recipe is slated for “make-ahead” so you can cook half and freeze half (before baking) for later. Since it makes quite a lot of pie, that is pretty essential for a two-person household. Yum!