Can I use polenta to make cornbread? I keep meaning to make it, and it doesn't look very hard, but I'm not sure if I can find the right ingredients here. I know you can't buy a mix like you're used to over there.
Not sure if this is authoritative, but what I have observed is three categories of corn meal: fine ground, medium ground, and polenta (coarse). So to answer your question, you probably could, but with coarse ground corn it might be a little grainy in texture. Adding a can of corn (drained and fried with a bit of butter) to the mixture might offset this a bit. If you can find it, the fine ground corn meal should give you the best results.
In the end, it depends upon your audience. The "purists" who grew up with the Southern style might be quite happy with polenta, so long as you baked it by frying it in bacon grease in a skillet. Where I live, they dislike the crumbly texture and lack of sweetness in the typical American style version of cornbread (they put sugar in EVERYTHING here, even spaghetti sauce). So let me give you the recipe of how I make it here, and at the end I will explain how to back out of it to something more in the American style. I'll also give you my method of making buttermilk from buttermilk powder, in case you can't get it "live." Makes 12+ muffins or one 9x9 pan.
Dry Ingredients
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175g all purpose flour (about one cup)
150g yellow cornmeal (about one cup)
50g white sugar (~1/4 cup)
4g baking soda (~1 tsp)
1/2 tsp salt
Wet Ingredients
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1 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup melted butter
1/4 cup honey
3 eggs, beaten
To make buttermilk from powdered buttermilk mix
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1 cup hot water
50g dry buttermilk powder
Mix together and let stand for five minutes
Directions
1. In a large bowl, stir together the dry ingredients. Make a well in the center, and then add the wet ingredients. Stir to combine. Pour batter into a baking pan, or ~2 TB of batter per well if making muffins.
2. Bake for 20-25 minutes at 190C/375F for a bread loaf, or 10-12 minutes for muffins.
Variations:
* Cut some beef hot dogs into 2cm long pieces. Place 1 TB of batter into each muffin well, then stand up a hot dog piece into the middle of the mixture. You make little corn dogs this way. Here's some that I made recently:

(four of them didn't even last long enough to be photographed)
* To make it "unsweetened" omit the honey.
* To make it crumbly texture in the American style, use 2 eggs only.
* Reduce temperature to 175C/350F and bake for five minutes more (more uniform baking)
* Cook in skillet with generous amounts of bacon grease. Makes a crusty bottom and sides. Looks like this:
