Polenta
On the bus there was a woman sitting in front of me reading a copy of Good Food. She skipped past the article featuring Gordon Ramsay and hovered over the Gary Rhodes article about seasonal veggies. I’ve noticed that Gary Rhodes always has the same sort of ’smile’ on his face in every photo. He’s a bit Dorian Gray isn’t he? Anyway she flipped past the ‘perfect pasta’ article and some other thing about how to make yer pastry stay flat. Now before you go all indignant on my ass and start talking about reading over people shoulders etc, I really couldn’t help but see what she was reading as she was one of these people who held her magazine up so that people three rows behind could see what she was reading. Anyway I digress.
She flipped to a page with the glaring headline ‘How we learned to cope with our childs’ terrible allergy!’ And there was a lovely photo of the family looking all healthy like.
‘Ooh’ I thought to myself ‘So what is the terrible allergy? Is it something like peanuts? Or maybe it’s something they can’t get away from like sugar or starch?’
But no, there in a little purple star was a note saying ‘All recipes are gluten and dairy free’. Ahh so the kid is lactose intolerant and has coelaic, big bloody deal.
The recipe (and quite frankly, the point of this post) was for ‘Meat Ragu with Polenta.’
Now I have a number of friends who I would consider to be serious foodie people. If you can eat it without incurring illness chances are they have tried it. But I don’t think that ANY of them like polenta.
For me the word ‘polenta’ is far too close to ‘placenta.’
Also I know of no way to make it even vaguely appetising. You see chefs struggle with it all the time on ‘Ready, Steady, Cook’.
‘Yar’ drawls the student from Yorkshire. ‘Oi’d ‘erd so much about it, I thought you cud shew me a way to cook it.’
And the chef is left to boil it and pour it out onto the plate like some sickening Italian porridge. Cos really that is all it is.
So yeah, polenta along with coleslaw and porridge - Foods of the Damned.
Polenta’s nothing more than porridge. Cornmeal porridge. It’s OK, provided you add an equal weight of butter and parmesan cheese to it. But then you’re left wondering why you didn’t just eat the butter and parmesan cheese and forget about the shagging polenta.
As was lovingly beaten into us in our school history lessons, cornmeal was one of the emergency foodstuffs grudgingly imported into Ireland during the Famine, a dubious act of charity the population interpreted as a kick while they were down. “Peel’s Brimstone” they called it, after the then-PM of England. Which only goes to show the Celtic Tiger cub will eat stuff not even their famine-stricken ancestors would, provided they think it’s cool.
Comment by Kesey — August 28, 2006 @ 10:36 pm
Hey I like polenta….
Comment by Paul Clerkin — August 29, 2006 @ 5:05 pm
ah yes Paul but when I’ve cooked polenta I’ve fried it…in it’s other liquid form it’s like cream of wheat…
Comment by christine — August 31, 2006 @ 11:48 pm