Eating Dirt

Polenta and Blood Orange Sorbet

Polenta is a rather intensive affair, when cooked at home from dry crunchy grit. The traditional recipe calls for near continuous stirring, for half an hour to fourty-five minutes. Deborah Madison offers a more modern walk-away version, but it needs to sit in a double boiler for an hour and a half, after two separate pots of water are brought to a boil, one at a time, on top of each other, all before the grit even comes into play. At my house, a cooking time that long and with that many steps could only be accomplished with very well orchestrated planning, which is not my forte.

So I chose the stir a lot method. I figured I'd be standing right by the stove, prepping veggies for the accompanying ragu, so it wouldn't be a big deal. And it wasn't. Except that I failed to notice what else was going on in the kitchen, most notably the scissors in my daughter's hand and the hair on the floor.  

Luckily it wasn't mine. I am too old for a mullet. But on a rather perky soon to be five year old, the look can be somewhat fetching. Jon Bon Jovi did always have a sort of preschooler-esque discipline about him, and when I found her in the living room, sitting on the sofa with the orange sky gathering through the window behind her, I could see the resemblance. 

Perhaps devoting all my attention to cooking dinner under the guise of taking care of my family is a bit misguided, but the polenta was pretty good. Excellent in fact. The ragu was passable. And the blood orange sorbet? Fabulous.

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Traditional Polenta (adapted from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone):

If you're making this with the ragu, you'll want to start the pancetta step of the ragu before the polenta.

2 cups course cornmeal

1 1/2 teaspoons salt or to taste

2 to 6 Tablespoons butter

Bring six cups of water to a boil in a large, heavy saucepan. Add the salt and then the cornmeal in a steady stream, stirring constantly with a whisk to avoid lumps and having the meal seize up within the first few minutes. Lower the heat and cook, stirring more or less constantly for 30 to 45 minutes. If the polenta seizes up into a hard mass, add small increments of boiling water while it cooks, to smooth it out. When done, taste for salt and then stir in butter. Serve immediately or keep it warm over boiling water (in a double boiler) until ready to serve.

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Provencal Vegetable Ragout (adapted from Cooking Fresh from the Bay Area):

1/2 pound pancetta, cut into one inch pieces

1 leek, sliced thinly into rings

1-3 sprigs thyme

1 cup chicken stock

1 quart water

8 to 10 baby carrots, scrubbed (sliced into baby sized pieces if you use larger carrots)

3 spring onions, sliced (spring onions are pretty small, about the size of a leek)

1/2 cup chanterelles or other forest mushroom (rehydrated dry ones work fine)

2 cups freshly hulled peas or shelled and peeled fava beans I'm sure frozen would be OK)

1 bunch asparagus, rinsed and trimmed

2 Tablespoons butter

Heat a small saucepan over medium heat. Add the pancetta and brown, for about 5 minutes. Add the leek and thyme and cook until the leek starts to soften. Add the chicken stock and water. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to low and simmer uncovered for an hour or so.

When the pancetta is tender and there is about one cup of liquid remaining (after about an hour), remove the thyme and transfer the mixture to a saucepan large enough to hold all the vegetables. 

Bring the heat up to medium, add the carrots, onions and mushrooms to the pancetta-leek mixture. Cover and cook for about four minutes (longer if you used older carrots). Add the peas, cover again and cook for two minutes. Add the asparagus and butter and cook for four more minutes, or until the asparagus and carrots are tender. Be careful not to let the liquid evaporate completely, you may need to add a little bit of water. When the ragout is finished, there should be only a small amount of liquid coating the vegetables.

Taste and salt, if necessary. Serve over polenta.

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Blood Orange Sorbet (adapted from Chez Panisse Cooking):

This is one of my favorite recipes. Ever. I've been making it yearly since my husband and I were given a fancy juicer by one of our wedding guests. Maybe since even before that, using a hand juicer, after my parents gave us an ice cream maker. Its a little late in the season this year for blood oranges, but if you, like me, buy them and then spend weeks agonizing over the right time to make sorbet, they will keep fine in a plastic bag in the fridge. 

12 to 16 blood oranges, to yield 1 quart juice

grated peel of two of the oranges

1 cup sugar

Grate the peel of two of the oranges and set it aside. Juice the oranges and strain through a fine-mesh sieve (this is a great job for little kids, have them rub a spatula along the bottom of the sieve to help the juice drain through). Place the juice in a pan or bowl and add the sugar and the peel. Stir the mixture until the sugar is entirely dissolved (another good preschooler job). Chill the mixture in the refrigerator, then freeze in an ice cream maker. Serve the day it is made.

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Stir Fried Mushrooms, Spring Leaves and Lemon Grass

 

This morning I realized our butter was rancid, but only after I'd taken the first bite of my bagel.  I also realized that the whole wheat bagels I've been buying and pawning off on the kids are just downright nasty too - like a combination of chaff and Metamucil, and not the pink lemonade or berry blast flavor either. Thats how my day started, sadly, another one during which I would have preferred not to have eaten at all.

I did manage to do some cooking. For starters, the kids and I whipped up the promised energy bar recipe from the Chronicle a few weeks back. Making the bars was fun - mix lots of stuff, boil something from a jar, stir it in, pour into pan.  Very easy.  But the bars themselves, not so good.  The flavor is fine, I'm told, but they are a sticky mess and not barlike at all.  I guess there are different types of brown rice syrup in this world, and I bought the stickier one?  With a few adjustments I think it might be an OK recipe, and then I'll post it here.  But today, a total disappointment.

Dinner was a bummer as well - Nigel Slater's spring stir-fry started out fine, but halfway through I grew tired of eating mushrooms and started wondering if I'd given myself too much rice. That just isn't something that usually happens to me when I'm eating. Most of the time I inhale my food as quickly as possible and then waffle over whether eating more is a good idea. I'd consider making this again, except that mushrooms aren't a usual food in our house, I love them, but they are almost never featured in our produce box. So maybe next time I'll just leave them out.

One good thing I did recently, though, was to add a search function to my blog. Now I can easily pull up all the recipes containing greens or mushrooms or Hello Kitty. And now you Facebook readers have an incentive to actually go to my blog, so that you can be properly counted.  Here's the URL: http://eatingdirt.typepad.com/

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Stir Fried Mushrooms, Spring Leaves and Lemongrass (adapted from Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries):

3 stalks green garlic, finely chopped

2 small dried red chilis

3 lemongrass stalks, inner soft part finely chopped

6 thin spring onions, thinly sliced

2 handfulls or so button mushrooms, quartered

3 Tablespoons peanut oil

1 bunch (about 4 handfulls) tender green leaves (spinach, mustard, mizuna, etc)

Sugar and Salt

soy sauce

toasted sesame oil

Get everything prepped, peeled and chopped, before you start to cook. When ready, put the peanut oil in the wok and heat until it just starts to smoke, then turn the temperature down a bit.  

First, add the garlic, chilis and lemon grass.  Stir it around and let it all cook for about a minute. Next add the onions, and when they are starting to wilt add the mushrooms and let them color, tossing them in the wok. Lastly, throw in the leaves, then stir and toss until they are wilted and bright green. Add a good pinch of salt and one of pepper, then the soy sauce, and finish with a drizzle of sesame oil over the top.

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