Adventures with Polenta

Ah, yes, Pittsburgh.  Pittsburgh got 24″ of snow this weekend.  It took my husband and me 90 minutes to shovel our porches and walkways.  That’s working together.  Then another half hour to dig out the garage area.   I’m still stranded though, until the borough decides to plow the back alley where our cars live.  Even if they could mash the snow down, that would be extremely helpful.

Since we didn’t go anywhere on Saturday or Sunday, I decided to do some cooking yesterday.   I made the Southern Greens and beans again, cause they are so yummy and easy to make.   But this time, I decided to try one of the recipes in Alicia Silverstone’s The Kind Diet.  The recipe I attempted, Polenta Casserole with Seitan, was chosen simply because I bought polenta (not knowing what to do with it at the time), and thought this was a good way to use it up.

This recipe was sort of hard for me to make.  Because my ingredients weren’t quite right.  I’ll start at the beginning.

First step of the recipe calls for cooking the polenta and the cauliflower in a big pot for 30 minutes.  Okay, that sounds easy, right?  Well, I had pre-cooked polenta.  So I didn’t know what to do!  I figured that if it was already cooked and eventually being baked, that I didn’t need to do this step.  So I put the cauliflower into the microwave to cook, and thought that ultimately I would save time.

I went to the next step, which was placing the seitan slices on the bottom on the pan with the corn and asparagus.  Okay … another easy one right?  Not in this house!  The recipe called for 8 ounces of seitan.  One of my packages was exactly 8 ounces.  I took it out, placed it in the bottom … um, that didn’t even cover a third of the pan.  Hmm…. so I had a different package that was actually 1 pound and some ounces … I used that as well as the stuff that I had already put in there.  I had a little more than I needed but thought a little extra protein never hurt anyone.

So the cauliflower was done enough … and the next step was to mash the polenta and cauliflower until they were the consistency of mashed potatoes.  Well, I ended up needing to use the electric mixer and it was lumpy … I never got it right.  I put the extra ingredients in the mixture.   At the end I spooned in the peas and I added red pepper because I love red pepper.

Poured the polenta/cauliflower mash on top of the seitan mixture as directed and baked.  I had leftover polenta mixture, but I just tossed that.

And I thought to myself that this had better goshdarn taste well, cause it was a real pain to make!  It smelled really good!

Here it is right out of the oven:

And with the first slice taken out:

I made a small greens salad on the side, and sat down and took my first bite and ….. BLAH!  BLAND!  And I like bland food.  Or food as its supposed to taste.

What I think happened was two things … the seitan … too much and in this recipe it didn’t get a chance to absorb the flavors of things around it.  And the other being, obviously, the polenta topping itself.   I think I could make this again and have it taste better, but I won’t bother.  In the meanwhile, I’m going to separate the seitan from the polenta, and spice up the polenta and eat that and the seitan … well, I’ll see what I can dig up as far as sauces go and eat that.   I am a big fan of seitan so this was a disappointing experiment.

On the plus side, I made a really, really yummy soup a few days ago.  Recipe taken from the February 2010 Yoga Journal.  The name, Green Soup with Sweet Potatoes.  So yummy, and I ate it all over the next few days.

Here is what it looks like:

And its very important to note:

I tried a Sharon Fruit and it tastes just like a persimmons, except without a pit and the skin is edible. Yum!

I’ll be back with more stuff soon!