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Easy Homemade Polenta

August 10, 2011 in Uncategorized by traveleatlove | 7 comments

I love soft, warm polenta as a canvas for all sorts of flavors, from seafood in cream sauce to a spicy fra diavlo, but I have always purchased my polenta in those handy supermarket polenta logs. I had no idea just how easy homemade polenta was to make until last week.

easy homemade polenta

Inspired again by the Moosewood cookbook, I decided to make homemade polenta cutlets with a spicy tomato “meat”sauce. The polenta was as simple as following the directions on the bag of Bob’s Red Mill organic polenta corn grits.

polenta grits

Two cups of cornmeal, six cups of water, salt, and butter later, I was forming my polenta cutlets in a well oiled glass baking dish. Fruity California olive oil gave them some beautiful flavor in addition to making it easy to get them out of the dish.

easy homemade polenta

Once the polenta was done, I made a quick meat sauce using meatless meatballs, lots of garlic and crushed red pepper, and a can of tomatoes.

meatless meatballs

canned tomatoes

When dinner time rolled around, I topped slices of polenta with sauce and parmesan cheese. The sauce was spicy and the polenta was pillowy, soft goodness, perfect in every way.

easy homemade polenta

I love discovering that some things are really easy to make. Smile Do you have any recent easy discoveries?

Tags: Food, polenta, recipe, Vegetarian

Lemony Arugula Pesto Tortellini Salad

August 2, 2011 in Food, recipe by traveleatlove | 8 comments

The title is a mouthful, isn’t it? And this easy pasta salad was too, a mouthful of lemony, garlicky, summery flavors, perfect for a late Sunday dinner at sea.

Making food for boating is tricky. It needs to be something that will keep fairly well and that will fit in the small fridge or in our cooler bag. And it has to be enough for a five or six hour trip, usually for four people.  One of the things I learned early on as a little boater was that eating is imperative. It’s actually when you don’t eat that you get more sick. So packing substantial food is key, and being creative is always important to me.

So important that Saturday night I could not sleep because I didn’t know what to make for a dinner outing with friends. We had cheese and crackers, pretzel thins, cookies, and salami, but we needed more. At around 4 am, I finally figured out all of the ingredients for this Lemony Arugula Pesto Tortellini Salad.

Lemony Arugula Pesto Tortellini Salad

While a container of Trader Joe’s spinach tortellini and a half a bag of orrechiette boiled, I whipped up a simple pesto made with several cups of arugula, a cup of baby spinach, garlic, juice of a well-juiced lemon, olive oil, sea salt, and parmesan cheese.

arugula

arugula pesto

The pesto was just so bright, due to the lemon, and slightly creamy from the parmesan and olive oil. It was bursting with flavor, and my warm pasta drank it in.

arugula pesto pasta salad

To the pasta I added a can of artichoke hearts, rinsed and chopped.

artichokes

And two cups of sweet grape tomatoes, chopped in half.

grape tomatoes

Three chicken breasts were chopped, tossed in the pesto, and baked until done. Them using my vegetable scissors, I shredded the meat to top the pasta salad.

arugula pesto chicken

lemony arugula pesto tortellini salad

Once chilled, the salad was the perfect light summer dinner, packed with protein and flavor, keeping us full as we bobbed along the waves and watched the sun go down over Boston. I am definitely going to be brainstorming more creative pasta salad ideas for the summer, just hopefully not at 4 am.

Do you have any pasta salad combos you love? Like me, do you do some of your best thinking in the middle of the night?

Tags: arugula, chicken, Food, pesto, recipe, salad, summer

Green Bean Ragu

July 18, 2011 in Food, recipe by traveleatlove | 11 comments

This week’s cooking is going to be heavily inspired by the Michael Chiarello’s Bottega cookbook. I can hardly believe my last visit to Bottega, one of my favorite restaurants ever, was almost two years ago. Time for this girl to get back to Napa.

Saturday was a pretty lazy day; pretty much all we got done was some shopping and baking and getting my broken phone attended to. When 7:00 rolled around, I wanted a simple dinner, so I set to work making Chiarello’s Calabrese Romano Bean Ragu.

The ragu can be served many ways, in a sandwich, as the book suggests, over pasta, as a side, or on its own. I decided to make it a light dinner. And while it was very easy, it was full of spectacular flavor.

I started with about two cups of green beans which I chopped into thirds and set aside. I also chopped about eight small red potatoes into half moons.

potatoes and green beans

First, the potatoes went into a pot of salted, cold water, and were brought to a boil and allowed to boil for a few minutes. I strained them out of the boiling water and threw the beans in.

I made sure the potatoes were nice and dry and added them to a pan of olive oil, about 1/3 cup that was being heated. I made sure that each potato had contact with the bottom of the pan and then left them so that they could a  nice brown crust.

frying potatoes

They came out lovely, tender, and golden.

fried potato

Once the potatoes were done, I strained the beans and added the potatoes, beans, a can of crushed plum tomatoes, three cloves chopped garlic, salt, and crushed red pepper to a pot. I brought the mixture up to a simmer and let it do its thing for about 10 minutes. The smell in the kitchen was incredible. I thought the heat of the tomatoes would go well with a crumbled goat cheese topping, so while the ragu simmered, I crumbled some up.

goat cheese

I served us heaping portions of the ragu topped with the cheese, which got soft and melty and blended in with all of the other ingredients. We were only missing a crusty loaf of bread for dipping!

bean ragu

I love the Bottega cookbook, and I have a feeling you will be seeing a lot of it. The food is rustic, and many of the recipes very simple. If only I could make my gnocchi as perfect as it is at the restaurant.

Have you been inspired by any cookbooks lately?

Tags: Bottega, cookbooks, Food, recipe, Vegetarian

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