Polenta
From the archives of The Fab Food Girl, sometime in early 2014
This was originally published on my old food Tumblr, TheFabFoodGirl, roughly 10 years ago when I thought I was going to make it big as a food blogger, when I wasn’t working at my publishing dayjob. I was young, and I had no idea what I was doing when it came to writing. This has been lightly edited to sound more like it was written by an adult instead of an overexcited tall child, excited to be truly independent for the first time in her life.
I had a really weird interview a few weeks ago. I mean, the interview itself was pretty standard, but leaving the interview something weird happened.
I was offered two packages of polenta. That’s right — polenta.
I tried to contain my enthusiasm. I wish I could’ve taken more than just the two packages. And in case you were wondering, no, it wasn’t any kind of bribe or anything like that; these was being marked out because of the expiration dates. They weren’t bad yet but they couldn’t be sold.
So that day I brought home a package of polenta with quinoa and a package of polenta with basil and garlic.
My maternal grandfather, the grandparent who I saw the most growing up, was Croatian. He grew up eating polenta; it was a staple pantry item for the family. For those of you who don’t know, polenta is basically grits: corn meal. And cooked properly, it is so damn good.
I was super excited to bring home the polenta because though my grandfather rarely made it when I was growing up, I still associate it with him and that part of our family’s history. (Also I was super excited because it’s delicious especially when it’s fried and then in sauce, which is what I did the first time I made it.)
That pre-packaged polenta you find in the store is already precooked, so all you have to do is heat it, unless the directions say otherwise. So I hacked the quinoa polenta into bits and then fried it up and heated some tomato sauce with bacon from a jar. (Edit from 2024 me: I cannot, for the life of me, recall what sauce I bought or ate at the time.) I like polenta fried because you can get it crispy if it’s cooked just right, although I feel like this is more easily accomplished with freshly made polenta instead of precooked polenta from a plastic tube. And after you fry it you can just throw it in the oven to keep it warm while you fry the other slices.
I wish I could’ve served this with goat cheese on top. It would’ve been good. Overall, the polenta was okay. I would’ve fried it differently again. Grandpa would’ve appreciated the effort, I think. Maybe.
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So I still had that other package of polenta, the basil garlic flavored one, and I contemplated frying it up again, but honestly I just wasn’t in the mood. I’ve just been settling into my apartment and into work, and I’ve just been so tired and overwhelmed from the transition out here that my cute lil brain yelled, “SCREW IT,” and threw the other polenta in a microwavable container with some milk and sour cream.
Because polenta can be microwaved. And because my grandpa made polenta with sour cream, to thicken it up, and add a source of fat.
According to my mom, Grandpa made his polenta with sour cream and bacon, which sounded absolutely divine to me. I’m sure this meal for Grandpa was a way of making a hot meal stretch to provide nutrition for a large family during the Depression, and so maybe he wouldn’t have been too wild about it. Who knows. Anyway, I half contemplated throwing bacon into the polenta for a hot minute, and once again my apathetic, overwhelmed, Tina Belcher self groaned and just hit some buttons on the microwave until it started to heat the polenta.
I also had gone a bit crazy a few days prior to making this particular batch of polenta, at a farmer’s market that happens to be inside my work building. I bought challah. I bought super amazing organic strawberries. I bought the most delicious buttery dates I’ve ever had in my life. And I bought cheese, because of course I bought cheese: a hard aged goat’s cheese, and the most incredibly fresh, garlic-infused cheese curds. When I first bought them, I threw them back like they were popcorn.
The point is, my polenta was heating and mixing slowly in the microwave, and I tasted it, and though it claimed to have basil and garlic flavoring it obviously didn’t come through well for me, so I decided OH WHAT THE HELL and threw in the cheese curds and kept heating the polenta so it’d get to be the right consistency.
This may have been the best culinary decision of my life.
The cheese was so fresh and garlicky it added enough of a kick to provide flavor- and texture too! I knew the cheese would melt well because the sales girl recommended I try melting the cheese on fries, kind of like a poutine. I may try that again sometime, but honestly I’m planning on just stocking up on polenta and making this over and over again.
I also threw in a pinch of cayenne for a kick (because, naturally, I’ve been fighting back a cold my whole life) and some salt and then grated some of that aged goat cheese on top to just give it a little bit of tanginess and oh man oh man oh man I’m getting so distracted writing about this right now because my tummy is growling I want my polenta.
Anyway, just to wrap things up for this version of polenta- I blended the prepackaged polenta with some milk, because you need to add some kind of liquid to stir in to get the polenta to the right consistency, and then I also added sour cream to add flavor and thickness for an even smoother consistency. Adding the cheese curds not only added flavor and some sweet cheese melty-ness, but it added some essential protein, which is good because polenta is literally just corn meal. That’s it. That’s why it’s super easy to cook- you can pretty much make any kind of dish with it.
I managed to be really good and not eat the whole dish in one sitting. The whole time I thought of my grandpa and what he’d say. I think he’d like my ridiculously garlicky polenta.
I never felt incredibly close to my grandpa growing up. I’d always been tight with my Grammy, his wife and my maternal grandmother, who passed when I was just two years old. We never really connected on things just because we had such different personalities. At that point Grandpa really had a hard time eating solid foods so he was eating a lot of soup. Actually, all I remember him eating was soup. And cherry Jell-o with whipped cream at The Purple Steer in Whiting. I was still obsessed with grilled cheese sandwiches and cucumber slices.
But what little I know of Grandpa and our family and our heritage, I know he’d be tickled to see me being so damn nifty and thrifty with my food. After all, it runs in the family.
