Corn Tornados

The first time I ever saw these I was blown away! So exotic! So foreign! Well, please forgive me, I was only about fourteen. My dear Mum (Hi Mum!) used to get these little pocket cookbooks, I think they were Family Circle or Woman’s Weekly, anyway, they put out a new one every month and it would have recipes and shopping lists and this recipe just stuck in my head for some reason. You know how we are always talking about Eat More Veg here at the Cookie House? Well, this is a humb dinger of a way to do it and will tempt the fussiest eater! Why not do up a batch next time you fire up the BBQ? Or you can just pop them in the oven like I did here.

So these are called a Corn Tornado. I don’t know why, I had never seen them before and I have never seen them since, how about we start giving them the attention they deserve?

Ingredients

Makes two

1 chorizo sausage, halved and then sliced

1 poached chicken breast, diced (finally made it through my mountain, yay me! You can use a store bought roasted chicken if you want to, I won’t tell)

2 heads of corn, leaves on (do try to get the most intact leaves you can as we are using these to steam this in, I will show you when we get to that step)

6 baby Roma tomatoes, quartered

1/2 red capsicum, finely diced

1/2 green capsicum, finely diced

1/2 bunch fresh coriander, chopped

1/4 red onion, finely diced

1 spring onion, sliced

1 small tin black beans, drained, rinsed, drained again

2 cloves garlic

chilli if you want some

First let’s take a look at these corn cobs.

Okay, so because we are using the leaves to steam them, are they leaves? Well, their green wrapping bits, we need to choose ones that are intact, see how they have the sticky up bit at the top? We do not want those ones you see that have been cut off, and we want the leaves to be pliable, so not too dry. Carefully, we peel these back, taking care not to tear them or pull them off at the bottom, like this

Good, now we snap this off at the base so we have our cob and its wrapping paper now as two separate entities.

Discard the corn silks.

Pop those aside and now take the corn and using a small knife cut the kernels away from the cob in a downwards motion. Put that in a large bowl with all of your other ingredients, give that a good stir.

Put a double layer of alfoil on the bench about four inches longer than your corn was. Now fold one side of your leaves up to form a ’bowl’, like this

Now stuff that fairly tightly with your filling.

Fold over the rest of your leaves so it is all encased.

Perfect! You can see I am doing this on the alfoil? We are using that as our outer layer, we don’t want to move these on their own if we don’t have to. Fold the alfoil over from side to side and then roll up the ends, like this.

And Stuart’s your uncle, ready for the oven. Bake at 200 degrees C for about 30 minutes or pop them in the BBQ if you have the kind with a lid that comes down for baking. Serve with the avocado salsa in the post next door. But....in the meantime, what are we going to do with our leftover filling? Because you are going to have some. Well, this is what I did. I took my trusty ramekins and filled them up about three quarters of the way and then I topped them with finely sliced potato, drizzled with a little olive oil and a good grind of black pepper.

Then I put them in the oven with the tornados to par bake for twenty minutes, then I chilled them, covered them with cling film and froze them for one of my Can‘t Be Bothered Cooking nights. Just so I could show you what they look like done I did have one for breakfast. Ten minutes in a slow oven first so the ramekin doesn’t freak out at the temperature change and shatter, then turn up the heat until golden.

That was a yummy breakfast.

Corn Tornados, capturing summer in our cooking. What could be better?