AND NOW:

Paula Deen’s pants falling down:

http://community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt/32520067.html

You’re welcome

My First Attempt!

Tonight is my first attempt at making anything at all Thanksgivingy. Tonight I’m taking the first step towards making traditional Southern Cornbread Stuffing. YUM!

I say “first step” because all I’m making tonight is the cornbread. Why? Well, the stuffing tastes best when the cornbread has a chance to get a bit stale before it combines with all the liquidy goodness of the stuffing. So, tonight cornbread, tomorrow, the world!

TO BEGIN: the ingredients. Now, who can tell me what’s wrong with this picture?

If you said “all the labels are backwards,” then you get 10 points for noticing the oddities of Photobooth. That is not, however, the correct answer.

The correct answer is:

That box contains CORN STARCH not CORN MEAL and THANKFULLY I caught that before making beginning my recipe because, turns out, they aren’t the same thing (I know, I googled). Good thing I had my thinking cap on!

So: here is the actual sum of my cornbread ingredients

Great! Now, to give credit where credit is due (for ethical and legal reasons): I’m mixing recipes from two Food Network chefs, Emeril Lagasse and, one of my favorite ladies in the whole world, Paula Dean. Paula’s recipe calls for the following:

2 cups cornmeal
1 cup flour
1 1/2 cup buttermilk
4 eggs
4 TBSP veggie oil

Emeril’s recipe gave me two great additions to this recipe:

1 – Emeril suggests heating coating a cast iron skillet (I used a frying pan) with the 4 TBSP of oil and popping it in the oven while the oven pre-heats to 350. Emeril also adds 1/4 tsp of Cayenne pepper to his recipe, but I added 1/2 tsp because I’m a Texas girl and I like it spicy!

So, we combine all the dry ingredients (the cornmeal, flour and Cayenne) and stir. Then we add the buttermilk and the eggs so the pictures looks like a less blurry version of the following:

k, great. Now mix it all together, then get your oiled up pan out of the oven (its hot!) and pour the batter in. Then just let it cook for 20 minutes!

When it comes out, it should look like this:

beautiful! See how the bread looks like its just floating in the middle of the pan? That’s because of that oil we heated up! It acted like a border between the pan and the bread and it also gave the cornbread a beautiful crust. See!?

nyum nyum

This cornbread could not have been easier to make! The hardest part will be waiting until tomorrow to make the rest of the stuffing.

Til then!

-Allie