I'm not sure if anyone else feels this way, but I hate to waste food. It may or may not be a result of the "clean plate club" that if you know my brother you have heard about. Either way, sometimes when I have leftovers in the fridge, I will plan an entire meal around them. Tonight was sort of like that. I had about 1/3 cup of corn leftover from a few nights ago that was not going to get eaten unless I threw it in another dish, so I felt like we should have corn bread, because what else are you going to put 1/3 cup of corn in? This evolved into, let's use those ham hocks in the freezer, and some dried beans in the pantry, because I need to make some space anyway. I had sort of hoped to do something more elegant with the ham hocks, but sometimes practicality wins. Anyway, so cornbread sort of planned the meal for us.
Problem is, I don't have a "go-to" corn bread recipe. I try something new almost every time and tonight was no different. I found a recipe that called for cornmeal (go figure!) only to realize that all I had was grits. So this led to a google search on what is the actual real difference between cornmeal and grits, where I discovered much to my delight that grits are just coarsely ground cornmeal. So after all that research I had to change almost every thing else about the recipe too, so here is what we ended up with. I will make this every.single.time. Everyone loved it.
3/4 cup grits
1 1/2 cups whole-wheat flour
1/2 cup honey
2 T baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup melted butter
3 small eggs (this is what I had.... if you use large I'd probably just use 2)
1 1/4 cup whole milk
and if you have 1/3 cup of leftover corn, just throw that in, too.
Mix the dry ingredients together, then mix in the wet ingredients. I melted the butter in a 9X7 pan while I mixed everything else together, so my pan was already greased and ready to go once the butter melted. Bake at 350 for about 45 minutes. Presto. Cornbread/cake.
