A watched pot...

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::

Blueberry + Lemon = LOVE

Lately I've discovered that late spring is blueberry season in Florida. I have lived here my entire life and never even knew blueberries grew in Florida! I've really been trying to buy as locally as is financially feasible for our family of 4, so when I saw giant boxes of Florida blues on sale at the store, I went nuts. There is reasonable debate on which is a more sound environmental priority: organic foods picked before their prime and shipped via tons of fossil fuels across the country, or conventionally grown in a neighboring county? Local won out over organic this time and I bought 2 huge containers.

They've been in my fridge for a few days while I decided how to most decadently serve them. Some had already been dipped into, and they were as good as they look! I originally wanted to make a light fluffy cake of some sort and top it with a goat cheese icing, with a few ripe strawberries to set off the blues. But alas, I'm am out of flour and our next co-op order was postponed 'til next week. What to do?

Well, I got out my cookbooks, digging to the bottom of the stack for a lovely Mediterranean pictoral book I picked up at a yard sale a few years ago, and the top of the stack: King Arthur Brand Whole Grain Baking. Both had lovely renditions including all american blueberry  cream pie, lemon blueberry calfoutis ( which I still don't think I'm pronouncing correctly) and all sorts of nice looking things, but they all required cooking the berries. These berries were too perfect to cook! I wanted something to pile them on top of FRESH, so I had to do a little mixing up...

Here are the pics. The recipe will be posted tonight. Now I'm off to work off the pie at jujitsu! 

Ok, Jujitsu was definitely a work out! Shihan at American JuJitsu Center decided to heat the room to about 92F! It felt like more than that, and delivered a workout to justify yet another slice of heaven, a.k.a. lemon pie with blueberries! The thought of that cool confection waiting at home helped me hang in 'til the last  kick, kata and "KIA"!

So here's how it happened...

The King Arthur cookbook had a great pie crust recipe made from oats and pecans. But of course, I had no pecans, and also no brown sugar, which it also called for. Technically speaking though, turbinado sugar is brown, and I had plenty of that. I also ended up combining the lemon curd/tart recipe from the mediterranean book with a lemon filling from King Arthur to make something easy that included ingredients I had in the pantry. So here is the recipe modification I came up with:

Lemon Pie with Whipped Cream and Blueberries

pat-in-the-pan nut crust:

-preheat oven to 350F

-on a cookie sheet spread out 1 1/3C whole rolled oats and 1/2C cashews

-bake them to toasted brown about 10 - 15 minutes, then cool before pulsing in a food processor to a uniform consistency ( I don't actually have a food processor, so I use my little chopper that came with my immersion blender and just do small batches)

-cut the oat/nut flour with about 6 TBS cold butter, a pinch of salt and about 1/4 - 1/3 turbinado sugar ( I do this with the whisk on my kitchen aid, mostly because its fun and I have one, but by hand is fairly easy to with either a big fork or a pastry cutter)

- turn out the crust mixture into a 9' pie plate and press with your fingers to evenly fill/line the pan and set aside.

The original crust recipe said to bake the crust without filling, but it was for a different type of pie with less time in the oven, so I elected not to, and I'm really glad. the nuts really brown up fast!

lemon filling:

-cream together 4 TBS butter with about a cup of turbinado sugar and a pinch of salt

-add 4 eggs one at a time

-add zest and juice of 2 lemons

Pour the filling into the crust and bake for about 50 minutes. Mine developed a dark sort of skin made of caramelized sugar, which was delicious, but not so pretty. I simply peeled it off (and ate it myself, fringe benefits of being the household chef) while the pie cooled on the counter for a few minutes. Then I stuck it in the fridge for about an hour. Once it was cooled through, I topped it with a generous layer of whipped cream ( 1C heavy cream, pinch of salt maybe a couple teaspoons of sugar whipped in the mixer 'til stiff) and then the glorious berries!A whole mountain of them!

 So, so pretty, don't you think? And the flavor was A-MAZ-ING! As approved by my kids, my man, and my sister. ( My mom said it was good, but too fruity for her, so I still accept that as a compliment!) YUM!

::kristin::