Avocado Cornbread

I was quite surprised to see cornbread served with steamed lobster during a trip to Boston and Maine. I didn’t know this was a thing. My previous connection with cornbread was always with a large steaming bowl of chili…and I really enjoyed the combination. But the lobster connection was completely new to me.

I didn’t actually taste the cornbread-lobster combination, but I was intrigued…and I knew I would be making cornbread my way very soon.

I decided to experiment a bit and try to create a version of cornbread which would have a very moist consistency and rich corn flavor. I replaced the milk with rice milk, which worked very well and basically identical to normal milk versions. I used my standard conversion of 75% olive oil to butter in the recipe, which again worked perfectly. Substituting the eggs were a bit more challenging. I have used a smashed banana in combination with ground flax seeds successfully in the past, but I didn’t want any strange banana flavors in my cornbread. The idea of using a smashed avocado just came to me one morning and it seemed like a good replacement to the banana.

The outcome was very good, if not a bit different. A friend of mine commented and told me it was quite ‘Californian’ of me. Not a terrible thing really!

Yield:  makes about 12-16 squares