Making Polenta

Vegetable stock and polenta

In the last month or so, we've been eating a lot of greens: the arugula and turnips have done incredibly well in our community garden plot, and once the CSA season began, we started getting spinach, chard, mustard greens, three different kinds of kale, and more arugula. This sudden abundance has challenged our creativity--we've made curries (both Indian and Thai), used greens in pasta, had wilted greens as a side, but still sometimes had more greens than we knew what to do with, and wanted to expand our repertoire. Every now and then, we'd buy pre-made polenta in the plastic sleeves, at about $2.50 per pack. Matt would

Garlic scapes and green onion

slice it up and fry it in a pan with garlic and olives, adding the greens at the end, and wilting them--and it makes for a very good light lunch or appetizer. And then one day, I had an epiphany: the "grits" (also known as coarse-ground cornmeal) sold in the bulk section of our coop is polenta! I don't know why it took me so long to realize this--maybe because I don't like grits (something about the mushy texture), and have never associated squishy grits with the crispy-on-the-outside and savory polenta. Whatever the reason for my previous oversight, I'm glad that I've made the (mental) leap because polenta is incredibly easy to make and so cheap!

Quick sautee in olive oil and salt

Adding stock

Not only is polenta cheap, but versatile, too. The spices and the liquid ingredient can be varied according to the occasion. What I had on hand were green onions, garlic scapes, and vegetable stock. (Remember when I said that I "wasn't thrilled about canning the stock?" I take it back. I've used up almost all of the seven quarts of stock--some has gone into soups, but my polenta discovery will have me using stock much more often, for sure.)

The basic thing to keep in mind about polenta is that the liquid to grain ratio is about 3 to 1; you could use water for the liquid, and as long as the polenta is organic and good quality, the final result would probably be wonderful. As I was making this particular polenta, I kept thinking of the flavor combinations that I could make in the future; sun-dried tomato and basil (or oregano); cilantro and jalapeno; pumpkin and thyme...

Polenta gets pretty thick; keep stirring!

Allowing the polenta to firm up

All this talk about polenta, and no recipe yet. What can I say, I got carried away contemplating it!

Recipe:

• 2 green onions, white and green parts, chopped
• 2 garlic scapes (or a clove or two of garlic), minced
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon dried basil (or other herbs)
• 4 cups vegetable stock
• 2/3 cup of water (as needed)
• 1.5 cups polenta/ corn grits/ coarse-ground cornmeal

Sauté the onions and garlic scapes in olive oil for a few minutes, just until they're starting to cook. Add the salt and herbs, stir to combine flavors; pour in the stock and bring to a steady simmer over medium-high heat. Once the stock is simmering, add the polenta in a slow and steady stream, and stir constantly with a wooden spoon or spatula for 25-30 minutes. As you're stirring, be sure to stir from the bottom of the pot, as the polenta will become quite thick quickly--and you want to both keep it from burning and keep it cooking for the full time, or else it will be too gritty. Add as little as 1/4 and as much as 2/3 cup of water during the cooking process--the polenta should be quite thick, but not too thick to stir effectively. At the end of the cooking time, taste and adjust spices; take the polenta off heat and transfer into a greased 8"x8" (or a 9"x9", depending on how thick you like it) baking pan, and allow to cool for a couple hours.

After the polenta cools, you can slice it and store in an airtight container for up to a week, refrigerated. As I mentioned earlier, to fix it, just fry some up with more garlic, onions, and greens. You can also decrease the recipe and use 1 cup of polenta for 3 cups of liquid, but (personally,) I like a thicker slice of polenta.

Polenta is also something that is often sold locally, and thus could be a delicious platform for an almost all-local meal.

Weekend Project: Potstickers

I love potstickers. Actually, I love all kinds of dumplings, steamed buns, and pretty much anything that is a savory filling in dough. I like making these things, too--there's something great about the process of making the dough and the filling, and shaping the potstickers, steamed buns, pies, etc. It usually takes a few hours for everything to come together, but the resulting food is usually enough to eat several times. Every few months, I set aside a half a day or so for the process; the previous time (a few weeks ago), I made kimchi-filled steamed buns--we liked them so much, there was barely any left over after dinner. I'd never made steamed buns before, and mine were far from pretty, but they were so good! I also like that I could make the dough for them myself, whereas with potstickers, there's just no way that I'm willing to roll out quite so many perfect circles of dough.

Yesterday, Matt and I worked on potstickers with three different fillings--one was tofu and green onion; another had king oyster mushrooms and buna-shimeji; and the third was a mix of mushrooms, napa cabbage, and green onions. We'd gotten the vegetables on Saturday in our CSA share, and although I had wanted to make kimchi, I realized that we still have some left from our last batch; the potstickers took more effort, but I'm glad that we've made them. We also made a batch of the steamed buns with a couple of the different fillings, and put everything away into the freezer for later.

I like doing this--putting away food for later; it's probably why I became so enthusiastic about canning so quickly. And canning paved the way for making more things like this... Not only can I make things that taste so much better than what I can get at the Asian market, but I can also use up the local ingredients that we get from our CSA basket.

Plans and Provisions

Same soup, a couple months ago.

In a few weeks, Matt and I will be spending nine days in Louisville grading the essay portion of the AP Literature exam. We love the city--it's not too big, but still has things to do, and really good restaurants that we've come to like over the last few years. We go to Louisville at least a couple times a year because Matt's parents live in Ohio, and Louisville is just about the halfway point between there and Knoxville. 

ETS, the testing agency that hires teachers to grade the AP tests, pays for much of the stay--the hotel and some lunches are covered. However, the lunches are often not suitable for vegans, and from what Matt tells me, if there is anything vegan, there's not much. 

In the last couple of years, I've stayed behind at home and eaten raw for ten days or so; this year, I'm glad to have been accepted to be a grader. Because we're both going to be there, I want to be sure that we have food to take up with us. This is where our pressure canner comes into play: I'm planning to make and can a couple different soups, so we can take jars of soup with us--they won't need refrigeration, and a jar is just the perfect amount for lunch. Today I made the lentil soup that has been a favorite for the last few months. The batch made nine pints. I'm still getting the hang of the pressure canner (it's only the second time that I've used it), and it was a stressful couple hours to get the pressure canner ready, sealed properly, venting, and to the right pressure to can the soup. All the jars sealed incredibly well, and the Tattler lids are especially concave, indicating a very strong seal. Matt's going to try one of the jars of soup for his lunch tomorrow, but a good few or the others will be packed away and awaiting the trip north. 

There have been a couple times that people have expressed surprise and dismay at the cost of our pressure canner; nonetheless (and despite having used it only twice so far), I think that it is more than a worthwhile investment--it will last us a lifetime, and it will be so useful! I love that I am able to can soups with it, and to have those jars in reserve for when we need them. Yes, it takes a good bit of extra time to plan ahead, but to me it is worth it. I think many people forfeit such things in favor of spending money on other things, or sticking to convenience--after all, it's much easier to buy soup in cans; but good quality and organic (vegan) soup is expensive (whereas the soup that I made today cost at most seven dollars or so). The main issue, too, is time. Xan expressed it best in a recent blog post, "When I tell people about this [in my case, canning], the near-universal response is awestruck (sometimes patronizing) admiration, followed by the statement 'where do you find the time' or 'well, that's great, but I don't have time for that.'" There is always time if people want to make time for things; I know that I'm mostly unemployed for the summer, but last summer, when I was working a shit job full-time, I still found time to can almost every other day in July and August. And speaking of (mostly) not being employed over the summer--it was a choice on my part because I knew that I could trade a few months' income for the ability to be at home and to have the full summer season to volunteer at Beardsley and other farms, and to be canning. It's a different way to make provisions, not using money, but using skills and connections.

Reduce, Re-use

Three years into being a vegan, veganism is normative to me; it's not necessarily always easy (I still have to ask questions every time I eat at an unfamiliar restaurant, and I continue to meet people to whom I explain veganism), but it is what is normal. There are definitely some things that I could still continue to figure out--in terms of cooking, or buying, or what-not, but for the most part, I don't spend as much time just contemplating veganism. And I think that I miss that, a little. I like thinking about the importance of daily objects, and how the domestic is the political. I know that making ethically-informed purchases is important--whether it's shampoo or food. And partially as an extension of my canning endeavors--which have shifted our dependence onto a different, and often local producer of ingredients, I've started thinking about other things in slightly different terms. Now that veganism is normative, I want to see if there are other areas in my life that I can change for the better.

Part of the change that I'm envisioning is a more radical reduction in my production of trash. I'm not sure how much I can reduce our output of trash, but I'm starting to try. I try to ask for ceramic mugs at coffee shops, where the baristas often automatically reach for the paper cups. I'm going to start trying to take more of my bulk containers to the co-op when I'm buying bulk items. I recently made lotion again, and am storing it in a mason jar. As of tomorrow, I will be out of shampoo, and I'm not buying any more; for that matter, I'm never buying body wash or face wash again, and am using castille soap and baking soda for cleaning not just myself, but just about everything. I know that a lot of the things that I'm not going to be buying anymore come in recyclable containers, but many of these containers are plastics that get down-cycled instead of recycled. Too often, we forget that reducing and reusing come before recycling. Reducing and reusing is more difficult than recycling, too, in that both force us to re-examine our methods of consumption, rather than just adding a step to our methods of disposal. Reducing, or doing without some things ultimately makes a bigger difference.

The main questions that I've been trying to ask of things are 1) Do I need this at all? and 2) Can I make (cook, can, or grow) it myself? I know that I can't make essential oils or baking soda or castille soap, but I know that buying those things means a much greater reduction in the number of cleaning agents that I buy. I hope that I can keep up with this, along with my resolve to not buy new clothes this year, and I'll try to note the kind of difference that it makes, before this, too--I hope--becomes natural and normative.

The Steadfast Little Collards

It's February, and although just a few weeks ago I was posting about how cold it is, and how good soup is on a cold day, it is now warm. At nights, the temperatures hover above freezing; during the day, it is warm enough to almost wear short sleeves. And so, I've taken the cover off the collards, and there they were. I sowed the seeds for these collards sometime in September, and by November, the leaves were big enough for us to eat for a meal. They're planted in a large drawer, which doesn't really allow them that much room, but they seemed to be doing so well when it got cold for the winter, that I just covered them with a bedraggled scrap of plastic, pinned the plastic down with stray bricks, and all but forgot about them until a couple weeks ago. And they're doing just fine, aside from a few spots eaten away by the persistent slugs.

Yes, the collards are growing out of a large drawer. The garlic, Egyptian Walking Onion, and oregano (above) are also in drawers, albeit smaller ones. (The other two in this location are empty for now, but I think they will make good homes for herbs in the near future.)

There is an abandoned school on our street--just on the next block; the building has been standing vacant since the '80s, and we started exploring it shortly after we moved into this house. One of the more interesting rooms in the building is a large home-economics classroom--it has three stations, each with a sink, counter space, and empty spaces where the ovens used to be; one of the stations has an old dishwasher, even! Directly beyond the classroom is a storage area, with shelves and drawers. On one of our exploratory visits to the school, it occurred to me that the drawers would make great make-shift raised-beds, and we started taking some of the drawers to our back yard. They're not very sturdy once filled with dirt and exposed to "the elements," but we don't expect to be living in this (rented) house for all that long, and they will suffice for our purposes.

Part of the reason for scavenging is that we just can't afford to pay for all the supplies for our small garden: we've bought tools, and some materials, and dirt, but the drawers have certainly helped out. Another reason for using found materials is that, as Katie declares in the latest Urban Land Scouts blog post, "I believe that thrift is a virtue and waste is a sin." The school is becoming more and more unsafe as it succumbs to the destruction of nature and pot-smoking vandals (and scavengers like us). There was some construction going on there over a year ago, but stopped almost as soon as it started; the building is destined either for slow decomposition or demolition. And the drawers are materials that would otherwise be going to waste...

And the collards seem to like it fine in the drawer; I sowed arugula in the drawer adjacent to it, and it's coming up quite happily, although the sprouts are too little yet to even photograph.