Basic Corn Bread

This recipe is adapted from The Vegetarian Epicure and is our go-to recipe for bread warm out of the oven. It's also very straightforward and doesn't require any particularly fancy ingredients.

Preheat the oven to 375° F.

1¼ cups

white flour (unbleached if possible)

¾ cup

cornmeal

2-3 tablespoons

sugar

5 teaspoons

baking powder

pinch

salt

1

egg

1 cup

milk

2 tablespoons

melted butter

Sift together the dry ingredients into a mixing bowl.

Beat the egg into the milk, add it and the butter to the dry ingredients (separately — you get butter globules floating in your milk if you add the butter to the milk-and-egg mixture).

Spread batter in a buttered 9-inch pie plate or oven-proof frying pan (e.g. a one-piece cast iron one) and bake 30-35 minutes, until the top starts to brown near the edges.

This bread is at its best right out of the oven with butter, but it will still be nice the next day. It is excellent with baked beans and coleslaw, or on its own for breakfast.

I've sprinkled grated cheese on it before sticking it in the oven, mixed garlic, roseamary and/or chopped onions in, and done it up plain; it's a good base for improvisation.

Cross-posts: boilingwater, my journal

Off-label money

I was poking around my tax returns, and it dawned on me that the last year I wasn't on parental leave for at least part of the year was 2009. It sort of follows from this that Elizabeth has been pregnant at least part of every year 2009 to 2012. Starting a family is a long-term proposition, apparently.

I've been thinking a bit about sort-of-off-label uses of financial objects lately. I bank with RBC (a big bank with lots of branches and ATMs) and ING Direct (whose slogan used to be "save your money" and which is a no-frills Internet bank). Strangely enough, I'm putting most of my savings and investments (and mortgage and credit card) over with RBC, and have found that for long-term saving, ING is kind of mediocre, but that their daily banking is fee-free, highly automatable, and quite convenient (as they have agreements with a bunch of other smaller banks to share ATMs). I think the magic time horizon is about a year — shorter than that, or wanting instant liquidity, and I go with ING, longer than that, or wanting more control over what the investment is in, and I go with RBC.

Another thing I've worked out is that although the yearly limits and long-term labelling of TFSAs would suggest that they're an account for socking away vast (to me) sums for projects on the order of years, I think the optimal use for me is actually kind of short term. I used to get HR to deduct a little extra so that I wouldn't wind up owing come tax time. In the last couple of years, inspired in part by spacefem's post (can't find the entry) reminding us that refunds are really just poorly-performing investments, I decided to stop kicking in extra and instead take the money and sock it away for tax time in my own account — a general "taxes" one that I try and keep ahead of federal, provincial, municipal and school tax obligations as well as missed deductions while I'm on parental leave. RBC helpfully suggested that they could wrap in my school and property taxes with my mortgage payment and pay those over the year, but I decided we may as well earn the interest on that rather than letting them have it. Over a year, all those taxes and contributions waiting to be paid generally accumulate a bunch of interest, enough to generate another slip to file. I'm more against managing another piece of paper in a house with a toddler and crayons as I am for saving the few dollars in income tax that slip obligates me to pay. Because the annual limit on TFSAs ratchets up each year, so long as my taxes stay relatively stable, I should be able to deposit and withdraw on a yearly cycle, earning modest tax (slip) -free interest and keeping me from having to come up with taxes owing. Having a TFSA for taxes owing seems a little perverse, but I think it's a pretty good use of the space.