Polenta Pizza
Polenta is Italian for grits. This peasant food dates back to the Romans, typically made from millet until Columbus invented America and corn became the preferred ingredient. Polenta has become popular in the past few years as a fancy dish. Move over peasants, we're in your diet, gentrifying your food.
To make polenta, you bring a pot of water to a boil, stir in coarse ground cornmeal, and simmer it for 20 minutes.
It has to be coarse ground. The fine ground corn meal you're used to seeing has been bleached and degerminated: the taste and texture will be all wrong.
I poured the polenta into two pie pans and cooled them in the fridge for an hour so the polenta would set. After an hour it has the consistency of really dense cornbread. In Italy, they eat it grit-style with sausage and lentils. You can eat polenta like grits if you want, but after it has set you can grill it, fry it, or use it as a pizza crust.
We made pizzas. Polenta gives you a gluten free pizza crust, if you're into that sort of thing. You can top it with just about anything, but we mostly followed the recipe from the Forks over Knives Cookbook by Del Sroufe. I used Buitoni Pesto mixed with Nooch (Nutritional Yeast), caramelized onions, boiled potatoes, and savoy spinach. Caramelizing onions is something I've only started to do recently. Scientists aren't completely sure how it happens, but you cook them until the sugars bleed out and turn brown, giving the onions a caramelly flavor. Savoy spinach is something else we've come across recently. It's a crisp, crinkly form of spinach sold loose in the produce section. It has more flavor and nutrients and stays crisper longer than flat spinach, which is the kind they stock in the freezer section.
I know what you're thinking. There's no meat in that picture. It's alarming, I know, but while the corn is lysine-deficient (like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park), the potatoes have high quantities of lysine, giving you a complete amino acid profile. The spinach has Vitamin C, Vitamin K, and Calcium and the Nooch is high in B Vitamins. So you could pretty much live off of this. If you hated variety.
I garnished it with crushed red pepper and parmesan cheese. Totally delicious.
You can find it online, last two recipes on the page:
Baked Sweet Potatoes
I've wanted to try a baked sweet potato for a long time. I used to think you could only eat sweet potato in pies or in casseroles topped with syrup and marshmallows. Then Brooke started making sweet potato fries and I thought, I wonder what else you can do with sweet potatoes.
I thought, I bet you could bake them and eat them like Russets. You can. Turns out, I wasn't the first person to try this.
After scouting the interwebs, we came up with an entree loosely based on this one from SkinnyTaste:
http://www.skinnytaste.com/2012/12/loaded-baked-sweet-potato.html
I sauteed black beans and yellow corn with onions and garlic and piled that on top along with cheese and salsa. As a healthy alternative to butter, we used some homemade yogurt we found sitting around and added garlic, onion, chili powder, salt, pepper, and cumin.
For dessert, we ate some blood oranges we found at the store. I had heard of them, but I hadn't tried one before. They were sweet and had a slight raspberry flavor. This is my new favorite orange.
Chicken Vindaloo
We've also been trying a few Indian recipes. They require a substantial investment in time, but they taste so good. When the Portuguese visited India, they brought a dish called Carne de Vinha d'Alhos which they made with wine and garlic (obviously). After substituting the wine with vinegar and adding hot peppers, the residents of the Goa region changed the name to Vindaloo and the rest was history.
I started by toasting and grinding all the spices. This smells awesome. Try it. If nothing else, just toast some cumin seeds. Best smell ever. Well, I think so. Aine says it smells like body odor.
I added the ground spices to vinegar and garlic and ginger and other stuff to make the paste, which I mixed with the chicken to let it marinate overnight.
I know I'm missing some picture steps here, but I then caramelized two large onions, added garlic, ginger, potatoes and the chicken and cooked it for about 30 minutes. I put it on some Brown Texmati Rice from the Republic of Texas and ate it with flatbread. Most delicious. Aine liked it, but she likes anything with potatoes in it, so...
Here's the official recipe:
Since Spring has sprung and trees are budding, we decided to take a drive over to the Arboretum and see if they had started replanting the Hartley Gardens. Not so much. Hartley still looked rough, but the trees over at Japan House had started to bloom.
Look:
Also, here are two fish:
Rennet
My cheese odyssey came to a grinding halt at Neufchatel. You need rennet (stomach enzymes from a cow or goat) to make serious cheeses. I went to the grocery store because Dr. Fankhouser said I could get rennet at the grocery store. Not so much with Schnucks. I even went to the cheese counter where they make some of their own cheese. The old ladies behind cheese counter looked completely baffled. They had a lively conversation among themselves about me and my request before turning and shouting "No!" in unison.
So I resorted to Amazoning it. I ordered it two weeks ago, but it shipped out of Massachusetts and those people have had their hands full. It should arrive sometime this week.
Parting Shot
Cooking Indian food can make you dog tired. Even if you're just watching.
No comments:
Post a Comment