The Duped Project 1/50: Homemade Cornbread

What's the hurry? Well, when dinner's gotta be on in 30, there's always a reason to make things happen fast and easy. In a Jiffy, you might say. Hardy har har. Yeah, sorry about that one. It's a curse.

I grew up with Jiffy in my grandma's kitchen - and the printing on the box is exactly the same as 20 years ago, as far as I can tell. So what's so fast about Jiffy? And what's actually in the magical blue box? 

Well, as it turns out, the stuff that's inside is actually rather wholesome. In fact, it's pretty much exactly what's in cornbread if you make it from scratch, minus the "wet" ingredients (egg, milk and butter) with two crucial exceptions: there are a few preservatives, and it contains animal fat (lard) and/or hydrogenated solids (so that you don't have to have butter on hand when you bake it). Yuck-o. Thank you, but my veins are happier without those trans fats. Let's see what we can do about that.

My dear husband went through a stage a while back when he had some spare time (long since a memory now) of cooking from scratch. There are several "legacy items" in our pantry left over from those spur of the moment trips to the supermarket, including 4 kinds of cornmeal. I'm not kidding. I guess he just kept forgetting he had already bought it. Anyway, this kind was "course ground," which just sounds yummy. And conveniently there was a recipe for cornbread on the back. Game on. (after the jump!)

First, preheat the oven to 425, then mix the dry stuff in a big bowl. My dry ingredients were 1 cup ea of corn meal and all purpose flour, 4 tsp baking powder, 1 tbsp sugar, 1/2 tsp salt. 

This is almost precisely what's in boxed cornbread mix minus the lard, which as I've mentioned, is assumably a substitute for butter. You may notice that there are two types of corn meal in the background. This is because all of the corn meal I have cannot be contained by mere mortal cabinets.

Adding the wet ingredients. See that beautiful, melty bowl of butter? Isn't that nicer than pig fat? I think so. I don't use margarine at all any more (I won't go into it now, but suffice to say: Butter is real), so that's the good stuff. The milk is hormone-free too. Aren't I eco-tastic?

Mixing! My highly sophisticated method of following the printed recipe said not to over mix. I did not question this wisdom. 1 minute!

I poured my simple mix into a greased pie dish. This photo is interesting. See that? In the time it took me to get all this ready, the oven was only preheated to less than 300 (and I was wearing a baby in a sling, thank you very much!). So even if you had done things in a "jiffy," you would still have to wait just as long. That's some nice looking chili too, eh?

Half-way. My mouth is watering.

Finito! I had to adjust the brightness on this one so the bread didn't get washed out, and I'm too lazy to edit in photoshop, but the result is a beautiful, lard-free cornbread, afloat in a sea of shiny darkness (aka, my stovetop). 

It was delicious. The coarse corn meal made all the difference. It was light and fluffy, but still hearty. My 2 year old didn't touch the chili, but she ate two pieces of this stuff (each nearly the size of her face). OMG. Do this. Like, now.

What I learned: 

• Cornbread mix that doesn't call for butter is probably filled with trans fats or animal products.
• It takes very little (if any) extra time to do it this way
• The dry ingredients don't go bad, and the wet are almost always in my fridge anyway, so this doesn't take any additional planning

Well, one week and one project down. 2%! Woo hoo!