Customizable Cornbread

Hey, I'm Louisa Shafia, here on eHow.com. And today, I'm making one of my favorite Thanksgiving side dishes, cornbread. So, a fun thing about cornbread is that you can really put your own stamp on it. You don't have to follow an exact recipe. You can put any kind of fun stuff into it that you want. And today, I'm actually going to add some dry fruit and nuts. So, I'm starting out with a classic recipe. I have my cornmeal in here, I'm adding some sugar, and this is actually date sugar. I don't want to use white sugar, so this is a less processed sugar. You could use whatever you want. You could use maple sugar, you can use white sugar. And so I'm also going to add some flour to this. I am adding baking powder, and I am going to just whisk together my dry ingredients. So, I use a large grain cornmeal because it's going to give me a more rustic looking corn bread at the end. But you can use whatever kind of corn meal you can find at the store. I'm going to add some salt as well. You just want to mix this around until all of your dry ingredients are well incorporated. OK. Meanwhile, I have a cast iron skillet I'm heating on the stove. And this is a really key part of making a good cornbread. You want to preheat your cast iron skillet, and then put some fat in there, whether you're going to cook with butter, whether you're going to cook with oil, either way you want to preheat that fat in the pan. And the reason I do this is so that when my batter hits the pan, it's going to make a nice brown crust on the bottom. So, you could either heat this in the oven, you could heat it on the stove top. So, I'll just let this melt. Meanwhile, I'm mixing together my wet ingredients. I've got some eggs, milk, and the rest of my butter. So, I'm just whisking this around and as I was saying, you can put whatever you want into corn bread. Some fun things to add would be some sliced jalape?os and some chili powder, you could add some shredded cheese and go ahead and make a really nice southwestern cornbread. You could do pieces of sweet potato, that would be really good in there. You can sweeten with maple syrup. It's really a blank palette. And when the weather gets cold, I like to turn on the oven and start baking. And this is one of the first things that I like to make. OK. So, I've got my wet ingredients mixed, I'm pouring into the dry, and I'm just going to fold my wet ingredients in. So, this is a pretty thick batter. It looks great. And then once I've got my dry ingredients mixed into my wet, I'm going to add my fun treats which are some dry cranberries, and you could use any dried fruit that you'd like. If you like raisins or currants, you could even add dried apricots into here, that would be great. And then I also have some coarsely chopped hazelnuts, which are really special. And if you're making this for a holiday meal, but you could also use almonds, you could use walnuts. You can really make this with whatever you have on hand. Now it's time to pour my batter into my hot pan. Yeah, makes that nice sizzle, that's exactly what I want. Just smoothing it out a little bit. And I'm going to let this bake in an oven that's preheated to 375, for about 30 minutes or until a nice pricked in the center comes out clean. So, once it's done, the cornbread looks like this. Really beautiful with lots of color and texture in it. Mmm...this is my favorite comfort food. And you can make this with anything you have around, any of your favorite ingredients. It will come out delicious. I'm Louisa Shafia, I'll see you next time here on eHow.com.