Cornbread and Elephants

If you do venture over to Periphery for dinner one night, be sure and order the cast-iron-skillet cornbread served with herb butter.

It's the old-fashioned Southern recipe, no flour, all meal--and it's second-only to Carlene's cornbread that she sometimes cooks in corn-stick cast-iron pans, sometimes in one big cast-iron skillet.  There's no actual recipe--just some self-rising corn meal, some buttermilk, an egg and some oil.

Or Jan's blue-corn cornbread--really delicious and unusual.

Or Helen's corn pone (Helen was my mother-in-law) made with cornmeal, salt and water and fried fast in hot oil so that it was almost paper-thin and brown on the edges.

When you leave Periphery, ask for an order of cornbread to take home.  It will be dinner for two nights even though the skillet is tiny.


If you go to Comfort, just north of Boerne, try the hot dawgs at the Comfort Commons on Main Street on Saturday.  There's nothing like a real hot dog to take you back to summer camping trips and back yard parties.  Remember hot dogs?

Comfort is a quaint little town with a few nice stores, including several antique stores, a clothing shop for women and babies, a gallery of local crafts, and an Elephant Story store in which the proceeds from home decor and clothing (all from countries where the Asian elephants are endangered) go to save Asian elephants.

There isn't much for these elephants to do anymore, the clerk told us, but they are smart animals, smarter than horses, and they play elephant polo.

Comfort is less tourist-oriented than Fredricksburg, and a fun place to spend a spring day.