Thursday, November 8, 2007

Vegan MoFo: Fucking up

Well, it happens to the best of us. Happens to the mediocre among us, too (that's me).

I have a bag of organic cornmeal on my shelf that's been staring me down lately. I wondered what to do with it for ages until one day, it hit me in a blinding, Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus-type flash (only without the intervention of deities): POLENTA! Of course! I should have thought of it sooner!

My mom used to make polenta, so I assumed it would be easy--I really don't give my mom enough credit. I used an Epicurious recipe for basic polenta, and by the time it was supposed to be simmering, it was already a solid chunk caught in my whisk Hmm. Long story short, I added less water than the recipe called for, and it still never firmed up and became polenta. What I had for lunch was basically grits with some mushroom, black bean, and spinach in it. It was tasty enough, but far too ugly to warrant a picture, and far too much of a failure to warrant a recipe.

I guess I'm sticking to the pre-made polenta in a tube for a while.

1 comment:

Emilie said...

At least it still tasted good! I've definitely screwed things up that I would never then actually eat (I've got the stomach of sugared up four year old in a spinning carnival ride though and don't like to provide any challenge to keeping contents fully under wraps). You've got to fuck things up in order to learn what doesn't work, thus making way for learning the things that do work. And I'm sure you'll make something excellent today.