I love cornbread. A whole lot. I love it with everything. One of the foods I miss as a vegetarian is corndogs (don't hate), and I'm pretty sure it's only because they involve deep fried cornbread. Having lived my entire life in the South, I like to think I have a well developed ability to distinguish bad cornbread from amazing cornbread. And let me tell you, there is A LOT of really bad cornbread in the world. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of not so healthy ingredients in cornbread. All of these things forced me to search for the perfect, healthier cornbread recipe I knew existed somewhere.
A friend gave me this recipe several years ago. I've had it so long and made it so many times and made so many adjustments that I no longer recall the original version. This was the first vegan recipe I ever made, and it's what really turned me on to not just vegan food (as opposed to vegetarian) but also clean food (that is, food without any refined or processed sugars). For the first time I realized that eggs weren't always necessary to make a recipe work, and sometimes recipes taste better without the eggs. I love using the flax egg replacement-- because not only does it work great, but it also adds a lot of nutrition. And because this recipe doesn't use refined, dry sugar like all the other recipes, it's guaranteed to never ever come out dry and gross.
Sometimes I don't make this recipe vegan by adding some freshly grated parmigiano to the recipe--but I've found that the addition of the nutritional yeast gives the same cheesy taste with the additional bonus of giving me all of my B vitamins for the day.
And to make this cornbread extra nutritious and southern, I like to add collard greens. Because collard greens and cornbread go hand in hand.
