Cooking with Polenta
 

Looking for ideas for making meals with Polenta.

I would go to food network; Paula Dean and Rachael Ray as well as others are always coming up with new ways to use it

Polenta - AKA corn meal mush
 

YUM...polenta is one of my favorite foods - guess it comes from being from the South and our 'inbred' obsession with corn in all its forms.

Have you already made the polenta and are looking for uses for leftovers or want uses BEFORE you make it?

Also, if you're a cheese fan - add MASSIVE quantities of sharp cheddar for a new twist...AND it requires REAL butter...oops, do I sound like Paula?

(The AKA corn meal mush is from an incident in my family probably 40 years ago. My aunt had returned from her new home in California and was making 'polenta' - My grandmother, dignified church lady that she was, took one look at the pot and announced 'Call it what you want - that's damned old corn meal mush - and I ain't eating it...'

Seems that she'd had to subsist on it during the Depression years and wasn't going back there again...(smile))

Polenta is just the Italian name for Grits. Of course, down south we have white grits and polenta is the yellow kind.

Might try here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/topics/polenta/index.html

Polenta recipes
 

There may be some recipes on a site "whole foods.com". These are large food stores in different states. I go to one in Greenville, South Carolina. If you get a chance to gomto one of these stores, do so. You may even do a search on the internet for "polenta recipes". You may be surprised what may come up. Hope this helps.

I love using Polenta and had no idea it was grits! I just fry mine in olive oil and add some sun dried tomatoes! Yummy and low calorie

I have put beef stew over it sliced and warmed on a plate. It works great.

Ok ... this is going to sound VERY weird, but this is how my (Italian) family served Polenta. It was very much a family "event" :) My parents were from dirt poor Italian immigrant families and this is how polenta was eaten. It is typically eaten by serving on a large cutting board saved for this purpose, but with larger families (like my folks, and ours) there was no cutting board large enough to accommodate the whole clan.

First, I can only recommend this serving method if you have a Formica (or similar) topped table. If your table top is wood ... not recommended.

Ingredients:
Polenta
Spaghetti gravy with ground beef
Parmesan and/or Romano and/or Fontana cheese (any hard grated Italian cheese will do)

Make the polenta and while still warm spread it out onto the kitchen table. Yup. Right on the table. Spread it to about 1/4" - 1/2" thick. Immediately top with spaghetti gravy mixed with the ground beef, then grate cheese on the top.

Everyone gets a fork and "marks off" their "area" of the polenta that they are going to eat by drawing a line with their fork. After that, draw more lines in the area to make lifting easier - scoop the polenta up one forkful at time and eat.

Seriously!! After a while it's fun to see the shape that the polenta is in with everyone eating from different sides of the table. It was so much fun that if Mom was making Polenta she HAD to invite some family friends. If my BF Donna found out we had Polenta for dinner the previous evening and didn't invite her, she would be very upset!!

I use polenta instead of spagetti--just put the spagetti sauce on the polenta. If there is any leftover it gets cubed up and put into a soup like minestrone or chili. I love polenta.