There is one chapter of Everyday Italian that I have been apprehensive to attack but at the same time remarkably curious about- Polenta. If I have ever eaten polenta before I don’t remember it or perhaps I ate it thinking it was some strange, smooshy vegetable.
To make fried polenta, GDL says to make a batch of fresh polenta and let it set in the refrigerator for at least two hours. Almost every night last week I intended to make this dish but time would slip away and if I started then I would end up gobbling up fried food around midnight and all the TUMS in the world couldn’t bring me back from that. So by Friday night I decided to skip the gym, come straight home from work and start on this strange substance.
You start by bringing a large pot of water to a boil. Then you slowly whisk in the cornmeal until it becomes thick. This doesn’t take that long. Before I knew it I could barley get my whisk through it. Then you turn off the heat and fold in the butter. The golden globby mixture gets poured into an oiled baking dish and sets in the refrigerator for two hours.
I know this isn’t news to anyone who has met me but… I like to clean. And when you have two hours to kill while your polenta is setting in the fridge, what a perfect opportunity to organize? So for two hours I blissfully putter around my apartment only to be plucked out of my cleaning euphoria by my growling tummy. It’s frying time!
What I remove from the chilled baking sheet can only be described as one of those big yellow sponges that you use to wash your car. Completely unappetizing but I get a faint whiff of butter and… grumble growl grumble!
I cut up the sponge into little domino-sized bites. They fry in a shallow bath of olive oil for 5 minutes on each side. One major design flaw of my tiny kitchen is absolutely no ventilation other than two tiny windows (one of which is painted shut) so it’s not long before the kitchen is filled with a subtle smoke cloud. I open the window and let the freezing February air suck out my polenta smoke. Crisis averted.
Earlier that day I took my GDL marinara sauce out of the freezer to thaw. So I sat down to eat at a reasonable hour with my fried polenta and marinara dipping sauce. The bites were tender with a crispy casing and the marinara sauce added a big punch of flavor. It was kind of like eating French fries or buttery mozzarella sticks but for all of the effort and the ingrained image of the car wash sponge, to be perfectly honest… it wasn’t worth it. And unfortunately, that wasn’t the only polenta recipe in the chapter. Let’s hope I have better luck with Baked Polenta or Creamy Polenta with Gorgonzola Cheese. Ugh, I’m going to need another bottle of TUMS.
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