When I was a kid, we sometimes had Sunday dinner with my maternal grandparents. My immigrant grandmother was a great cook; I grew up eating northern-Italian cooking because that’s what she made. She had a sixth-grade education, but she also subscribed to Gourmet and Bon Appetit—it took me years to see that those two things don’t necessarily go together. My mom is also a good cook. I wouldn’t say that either my mother or grandmother taught me how to cook, but they did teach me how to eat and enjoy food by providing it for the table.
One Sunday meal was pot roast and polenta. I eventually figured out that it was cloves in the pot roast, along with tomatoes and red wine, that gave her pot roast its distinctive flavor. And I didn’t give much thought to the polenta; I liked it, a lot, but it didn’t seem special. It was cornmeal and water and some salt, after all; cheap food. Thus, when polenta had its moment a few decades ago, I rolled my eyes. Yeah, you can fancy it up, but it’s still cornmeal and water and salt and stirring.
One of my stated principles is to use shit up—find those things tucked away in the freezer and eat them—but it often fights with another deep-seated habit, that of “saving” Good Things rather than using or consuming them. With food, that means I might end up saving something past its prime. (More on this in another post.) So, Sunday I attacked both of those things by making scallops, side-striped shrimp, and polenta; the polenta used up the last of my cornmeal and the scallops have been around awhile. I wilted some spinach and threw it in a pan with a little butter and garlic, too.
The biggest challenge I have with polenta is that I only have two hands. If you use the Marcella Hazan method, you have to drop the cornmeal into boiling water, practically grain by grain, while stirring vigorously; unless you’re truly ambidextrous—I am not—you have to decide whether you’re going to try to stir viscous, boiling substances vigorously, with your non-dominant hand, or try to slowly drop grains of cornmeal with your non-dominant hand. There’s another method—mixing the cornmeal with some of the (cold) water first—but of course I didn’t think to do that when I made polenta yesterday. Ergo, big-ass lumps in my cornmeal. I don’t have an immersion blender, but I do have a mini-prep food processor, so I used a slotted spoon to pull out the lumps, and added some water (from the pot, though I had to use other water as well), and whirred it all up in the mini-prep before putting it all back in. It worked out okay, but the boiling-over-onto-the-stove part, in combination with the adding-water-to-the-lumps part, meant my water-to-cornmeal ratio was off, and the polenta took forever to cook. It was still fine.
I also have a whole LOT of polenta left over. My mom told me that when she was a kid, they’d slice it, brown it in butter, and put maple syrup on it, for breakfast. Instead, what I’ll probably do is slice and brown it, but put my evening beans-and-veggies dinner on top of it. Meanwhile, here’s a pic of last night’s dinner.
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