Cornish hens are just little chickens and hominy is just corn. But they both have funny names and they go together nicely. Corn becomes hominy through a process of soaking the kernels in lye. I do not participate in this process myself. I harvest hominy by picking a can off the shelf in the international foods aisle. Here I digress briefly to wonder, why are the only foods that are actually native to this country found only in the international foods aisle?

Cornish hens also fake their international cred. They originated in Connecticut, not Cornwall. I guess ‘connecticutish hens’ didn’t fit on the label. This must be why cornish hens taste so delicious prepared with hominy. Truly native foods falsely labelled as foreigners must suit each other well.

I cut up some yellow onion into dice-sized chunks, mixed them into the hominy, added a bit of pureed hot pepper in a tomoto base, just enough for flavor. Stuffed this into two cornish hens then basted them with a puree of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce mixed with olive oil. Yeah, I used the canned stuff.

I fired up the grill, blasted the little birds at about 450 degrees then turned down the burners, reapplying the basting  a couple of times until they were cooked and delicious. I mixed the leftover stuffing with a combination of wild rice and short-grain brown rice and served the birds sliced in half over rice.

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