Tuesday

Tasty Tuesday: Poor Man Food

Growing up I loved when my mom would say, "We're having a poor man's dinner tonight." Translation: beans and cornbread. Maybe that's why, even today, beans and cornbread is one of my favorite meals.

Not too long after I married Hubby, his mom gave me one of the simplest and easiest cornbread recipes EVER! And of course, it's really good too!

Two caveats about my cornbread:

1) I do NOT like sweet cornbread! So if you are a Jiffy cornbread fan, you might want to add some sugar to the following.

2) While I do try to cook healthy most of the time, I like a nice, crispy piece of cornbread and the best way to achieve that is with butter. So beware if you are on a diet.

If the above is agreeable to you, then proceed.

Here is what you will need:


1/2 cup cornmeal
1/2 cup flour
1 egg
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup milk
1-2 Tbsp. butter

First, preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Put everything into a bowl and mix.



After mixing, it will look like this.



Put butter in iron skillet and place in hot oven to melt the butter in the pan.


I know, my pan is all rusty, but Hubby didn't believe me when I told him you can't let iron skillets air dry. I'm putting a new one on my Christmas list.

Once the butter is melted...



pour in the batter.



Bake for 12 to 15 minutes. I like my cornbread crunchy so I bake it for 15 minutes.



Top with some butter or beans and enjoy!



SOOOOO GOOOD! And, yes, we did have beans with it :)

This recipe is actually the original recipe cut in half because if I make it all, it makes too much cornbread for us. This cornbread can also be made in glass baking dishes. In fact the orighinal recipe is supposed to be cooked in an 8x8 baking dish. When I take cornbread to potlucks, I cook it in a 13x9 baking dish. You can still do the melted butter in the baking dishes just do a little more, but you won't get it as crispy as you do in an iron skillet.

Original Recipe for the 8x8 baking dish:
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup flour
2 eggs
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 cup milk

Doubled Recipe for the 13x9 baking dish:
2 cups cornmeal
2 cups flour
4 eggs
8 tsp baking powder
2 tsp salt
2 cups milk

Enjoying my poor man dinner in the treehouse,

Chelli

3 comments:

  1. chuckle--we like "poor man food" around here too! My husband's favorite is to fry a little bit of ham, make milk gravy with it, and eat it over cornbread! :) His second favorite is ham and beans (made with ham hocks, of course!)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sounds like a great meal. Bacon fat works instead of the butter as well! Just saying...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Try this if you haven't before you toss the skillet (scrub with a brillo {no soap} to remove large rust flakes, dry, rub all over with oil and bake in a slow oven for a few hours.) Tell Luke, oops, I mean...Santa ;-) to bring you something fun for Christmas instead! :)

    We <3 cornbread here, too!

    ReplyDelete