The Polenta Incident
No idea what to do for supper last night; we’ve eaten everything in our repertoire, twice. Then polenta springs to mind. I make a wonderful polenta. I probably have the right cheeses, or at least enough cheeses, and I know I have cornmeal. What I do not have, I learn, is my polenta recipe, which came from a bag of Hodgson’s Mills cornmeal. Best polenta recipe, hands-down, but I can’t find it anywhere. Searched the web, and Hodgson’s Mills is the last commercial entity on the planet without a website. There’s a website for a company in Brooklyn that makes exactly ONE kind of refrigerator magnet (and a superstrong kind it is, too). There’s a website for potted meat. But no website for Hodgson’s Mills. And no other polenta recipe that quite looks like mine. Well, says I, I’ve made this a lot, I know everything but the measurements, so I’ll wing it.
All I can say is, no matter how much water you think you need to add to cornmeal to get it to boil up, add some more. I ended up with a burnt mess (yes, several of the recipes extolled the virtues of double boilers, but I’ve never had to do that with my recipe). Separated out the burnt from the unburnt, added more water, went on. Cheese — let’s see, enough mozzarella for about half a layer, and then . . . no other hard cheese. None. Except: Swiss cheese slices. Desperate now. Into the food grinder they go. Oh, shit, I forgot to mix the jalapenos in with the cornmeal. Okay, add them as I’m layering. Temperature? Let’s say 450, and let’s guess somewhere between 12 and 18 minutes. In the end it came out fine, though, in fact it was quite tasty, but I think I need to find that recipe again.
Word of advice for those who find themselves with a heap of unused, boiled cornmeal: it will not serve as cornmeal mush for breakfast. Just trust me on this.
Note to Chimera fans: Yeah, sure, it’s a great browser. But it won’t load the Blogger homepage. Or a bunch of other stuff. I think if we had just outlawed free software, we’d probably have a workable web browser by now. Take away the profit motive, let Microsoft kill off everyone else, and we’re stuck in permanent beta.