Every food magazine I thumbed through this month has featured golden, delicious, fresh corn. I have always loved me some corn so I didn’t mind some outside-the-box ideas with this crunchy, sweet vegetable and two recipes that piqued my interest were in Cooking Light magazine including Corn Pancakes with Salmon and Lemon-Chive Cream (http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/corn-pancakes-50400000122463/) and Saucy Crawfish with Whole Corn Grits (http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/saucy-crawfish-50400000122462/).

I just adored both of these for their creativity and combination of flavors in each dish. With the corn pancakes, I definitely have a new entertaining dish I can serve when we have friends over. This is an impressive looking and well, more importantly, tasting dish. It’s elegant and refined and heck, y’all, it’s a corn pancake! We loved the fresh salmon and the absolutely perfect pancake. Put a dollop of the lemon-chive cream on top and it was mouth-wateringingly good. I served with a fresh side salad of arugula, feta and lemon-oregano dressing.

Mmmm, moving on to the grits recipe. I’m such a Southerner when it comes to food and this reminded me of my childhood in a big way. When I was little we would go to this super fancy place called Johnny Cace’s in Longview – still one of my Mom’s favorites. This place is an institution in East Texas and and they can serve up some serious Creole y’all: http://www.johnnycaces.com. At first glance it can seem like there’s a lot going on but this dish came together quite quickly. Those grits are to DIE FOR with the fresh corn, as is that sauce…yum, yum, yum. I substituted shrimp instead of crawfish but could see this being killa with some mudbugs. I urge you to make both of these before the summer fresh corn is gone.

Oooh the new Bon Appetit and Cooking Light have uploaded to my Kindle – must go read!