Senselessly Random: Corn, wonderful corn!

It's corn season here, YUM!! My favorite is to BBQ it and then use a spiced butter on it and enjoy. The butter is roughly 5 parts butter, 2 parts chili powder, 1/2 - 1 part garlic and the same with salt and then 1 part cumin. Good stuff!!

Anyway, today I decided to freeze some of it. I ended up doing 4 dozen ears. First, some shucked ears, ready to be blanched.

I steam blanched and here's the ears in my makeshift steamer and steamer basket

Then I put them in a cold water bath the stop the cooking process.

Here's some blanched and cooled ears waiting to be scraped.

Here is some of the corn that has been scraped off of the ears with a sharp knife.

A few bags ready to go into the freezer.

Here's the scraped cobs. I'm going to experiment with corn cob jelly and/or syrup.

I'm also going to experiment with drying just a bit to see how I like it. I always freeze it, but if it tastes just as good dried, that would be the way to go.

I also save the cornsilk for medicinal purposes. And a few husks in case I actually get as far as trying to make tamales. I never seem to actually get that accomplished, but some day!

Since I've tinctured all the silk from the Painted Mountain corn (which also has colored silk, by the way, how cool!) I decided to dry this batch. I usually air dry but since I had the dehydrator set up for the corn, I figured I'd go ahead and use it.