Skillet Cornbread

We got some snow yesterday.  Like a foot.  For most working adults, a foot of snow means shoveling the car out of the driveway and navigating treacherous roads.  For those of us who work in the school system, a foot of snow means you can hit the snooze button because it's a snow day!  And if you're a foodie who has a snow day, that means spending all day in the kitchen.  And staying in your pajamas as long as humanly possible.  Maybe that last one's just me. I love wearing my PJ's.

Wardrobe aside, I think it should be a law that if you have the day off of work due to a massive snowstorm, you should be required to make soup.  Write your congressmen and women.  On this particular snow day, I chose my delicious very veggie beef and bean chili as my soup du jour (it's the soup of the day [and that's a Dumb and Dumber reference]).  I also think it should be a law that when you make chili, you must make cornbread.  With all these great ideas, maybe I should run for Congress!  I have a great go-to low fat cornbread recipe.  But yesterday, I felt like trying something new.  I've had skillet cornbread on my radar for a while, so it seemed like the day to give it a shot.  Could I have a new favorite cornbread recipe?

Makeover Monday: Reduced Fat Sloppy Joe Cornbread Bake

This recipe is a bit of a Frankenstein.  Gather 'round and I'll tell you its tale!  Shortly after getting married, I bought some hamburger buns, a packet of seasonings, and made Sloppy Joes.  My husband politely told me that although Sloppy Joes are okay, if we are having beef on a hamburger bun, he would just prefer that we have cheeseburgers.  So I consented to not making Sloppy Joes anymore.  I like them, but I could live without them.  

Then about a year ago, I found a recipe for Sloppy Joe cornbread bake.  This recipe for a Sloppy Joe base topped with cornbread seemed to solve my dilemma.  I could have the goodness of Sloppy Joe, but it wasn't on a bun, so it wasn't competing with cheeseburgers for my husband's affection.  Before I had a chance to make it, I saw a recipe for Sloppy Joes that included a can of beans.  I am always trying to get more beans in my diet, and this sounded like a great way to do so.  

So I combined those two ideas and added beans to the Sloppy Joe cornbread bake.  I made it a few times using a packet of Sloppy Joe seasonings, and I never had any complaints.  I was satisfied with my Sloppy Joe situation.  Then I found a recipe for reduced fat Sloppy Joes in Cook's Country that was made from scratch.  This kept getting better and better!  So I combined the three recipes together into one reduced fat Sloppy Joe cornbread bake.  It's alive!

Makeover Monday: Low Fat Cornbread

Cornbread is delicious, but it has a bad rap for being high in fat.  Case in point, the southern part of our great Union.  I didn't eat a lot of cornbread going up.  Then I discovered what apparently the whole world already knew; cornbread is awesome with a hot bowl of chili.  And I do eat a lot of chili.  So now I eat a lot of cornbread.

I started my cornbread journey with a basic recipe from an old cookbook I inherited from my grandma.  It was good and I do want just a simple cornbread to take the edge of the heat of the chili.  But the original recipe was a little fatty for me.  Between the one cup of whole milk and 1/4 cup of shortening, I was potentially looking at a little over 7 grams of fat for piece one piece.  Compare it to a slice of whole wheat bread with its 1 gram of fat, and that seemed a little extreme.