You know the old saying, " A watched pot never boils"? Well, that may be true, but so is this: If you watch the pot until you think it SHOULD be boiling, then look away for about 15 seconds, that pot WILL boil, and boil over. This is especially true if you are boiling something
potentially messy, stinky, or otherwise not fun to clean up. And you have a glass top stove. And you just spent a great deal of time the previous day giving the kitchen a major overhaul.
Thank goodness it was just yogurt and water at the time!
Now the pot is full of Organic Cheddar-Parmesan Polenta with Fresh Herbs. Sounds fancy, huh? Not really.
My mission for this morning was to make breakfast, a contributory potluck lunch dish, AND something for dinner tonight since I have a meeting to go to as soon as my man gets home from work. All of that before 9 am, so we have time to get ourselves motivated to leave in time to do all the errands we have on the to-do list.
So of course, as soon as I got up today, I prioritized by checking my email, facebook, and now that I tweet, twitter. Yeah, I know, I know. I saw a tweet from Foodimentary that said today is "Grits for Breakfast" day, and the light bulb above my head appeared: My (still sleeping at 9am) children will have "cheese grits"(read polenta) for breakfast, potluck will be cheesy
polenta(since my kids rarely eat my food at potlucks anymore anyway), and dinner will be fresh salad and maybe some homemade ravioli from last weeks pasta day with Cheri (we'll post on that soon, I promise!). Mission accomplished!
Now I can just add scour the stovetop to the list of things to do!
Thankfully polenta is a magic food that is quick, yum, super easy and cheap! All the qualities we love over here at Eat @ Mom's! Yessiree!
Here's this mornings version...
Bring to a boil:
4 cups water
2 cups plain yogurt
a pinch of salt
Wisk in:
2 cups yellow corn meal (ours is non-GMO organic that we get in bulk from our dry goods co-op, and tastes so good!)
Once it begins to thicken, which is always faster than I expect, reduce heat to low and stir in a couple tablespoons of butter, then grate in cheese to taste. You can grate first then measure, but I usually just do it right over the pot until it looks like enough. Today I used raw organic sharp cheddar (also from our co-op and also SO good!) and organic parmesan that I found by accident at BJ's! (I was pretty stoked about it actually). I probably used about a half to 3/4 cup of cheddar and 1/4 cup of the parm.
My garden is ready to be planted next week (remember I'm WAY down south so, fall is our spring) which means hardly anything is out there. Surprisingly I scrounged up enough thyme and plenty of garlic chives to make the polenta extra tasty, which was about a tablespoon of them combined. You can use whatever herbs you grow or can otherwise get a hold of.
Then give your polenta a fancy name based on what cheese and herbs or other secret ingredients you stirred in , and you have yourself a very impressive dish to share with friends!
So now, kids are up, day is started, we're ready to tackle the to-do list, I still have a stove to clean (blog = procrastination), and I'm ready to watch my pot again, but this time I hope what's in it disappears!
::kristin::
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