Are you familiar with tamale pie?
I had a difficult time finding a description of this dish I grew up with, but after a few minutes found this from The Free Dictionary - a meat mixture covered with cornbread topping that resembles a Mexican dish.
One of Grandma Karen's favorite dishes to make for our family was tamale pie. I can picture the box she would take out of the pantry that contained packets of sauce and cornbread mixings. She would brown ground beef, mix it with sauce, then make a cornbread topping to spread over the top.
Grandma never had a problem getting us kids to eat our meal on any night tamale pie was set on the dinner table!
You know I prefer to skip boxed meals with their crazy added preservatives, sugar and sodium (these days Grandma does too), so I made my tamale pie from scratch. It was easy enough to roast vegetables and toss them in a baking pan with black beans, then cover it with my own cornbread batter.
It's the cornbread that makes a tamale pie, and this honey sweetened bread works perfectly with my nutty roasted vegetables.
I serve my pie with the cornbread on the bottom, then top the veggies with tart sour cream and a few cubes of fresh avocado. I like how the bread breaks up on the bottom of the bowl and gently soaks in the flavor of the vegetables.
I'm on a roll with meat-free meals these days, but you can easily add cooked ground chicken breast, leftover cooked chicken, extra lean ground turkey or even super lean ground beef to this recipe and it would work equally as well. But if you're calorie counting, I'd swap the beans out for the meat.
That's it for today folks! I hope you have a successful and productive week ahead! Be sure to leave a comment if you have suggestions or questions. I'm always happy to chat with fellow food lovers.
Roasted Vegetable Mexican Tamale Pie
- ½ cup whole wheat pastry flour
- ½ cup corn meal
- 2 large egg whites
- 1 tablespoon honey
- ½ cup low fat milk
- ½ tablespoon grape seed oil
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- ½ small jalapeno, minced
- 1 cup pepper jack cheese, shredded
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and spray a square non-stick baking dish with cooking spray.
- Spread 6 cups Mexican roasted vegetables onto the bottom of the baking dish.
- Combine flour, corn meal, eggs, honey, milk, oil, baking powder and salt in a bowl, then pour over the top of the vegetables.
- Bake for 30 minutes until cornbread is browned.
