Polenta Concia – Daring cooks challenge: Cornmeal

Rachael of pizzarossa was our August 2012 Daring Cook hostess and she challenged us to broaden our knowledge of cornmeal! Rachael provided us with some amazing recipes and encouraged us to hunt down other cornmeal recipes that we’d never tried before – opening our eyes to literally 100s of cuisines and 1000s of new-to-us recipes!

Hm, cornmeal. Interesting, I have never ever used cornmeal in my life before. So, making something I never made with cornmeal is not a problem. Only, what? I quickly decided on polenta, since that’s been on my list of to-be-made recipes for a long time. Only, I could not decide what to make it with, i mean, just polenta does not really consist of a meal right? Last week when I scrolled through the Daring cooks forum, Manu‘s pictures gave me the right idea: polenta concia. I had never heard of this, but when I read aloud the list of ingredients to my girlfriend, she said: recipes with butter and cheese cannot be wrong, right? I agreed, and looked around in the internet to find more exact recipes. These do not seem to be available, hence I combined a few, and tried to make my recipe look like Manu’s pictures.

Here is what you need (for two persons, well three maybe):

• 150 gr. corn flour
• 600ml water
• 100gr fontina in small cubes (or gruyere, or something alike. I did not find fontina and got a good substitute from my cheese man, unfortunately I forgot the name EDIT: it’s called abondance!)
• 50gr gorgonzola
• 50gr butter

Cook the corn flour in salted water. Stir well. When cooked, mix in the butter. Mix in the fontina and put everthing in an oven pan. Put gorgonzola on top. I put aluminium foil on top, but I guess you can leave it uncovered. Put in oven (180 degrees) for about 15-20 minutes. I served this with a simply green salad. Nice! It’s more like a winter or autumn dish though, but nevertheless: good recipe. I’ll make it again, and I will sure make polenta again, very easy, very quick. hmmm. nice.

oven dried tomatoes

This is so easy, and so incredibly nice. Buy as many tomatoes as you like, if you can find several varieties, even better. wash them, cut them in half and put them on oven trays. Chop some garlic, and sprinkle this on the tomatoes:

Put them in the oven to dry, on the lowest possible temperature, for about 3,5 to 4 hours (depending on temperature, size of tomatoes and how dry you like them). Mine looked like this:

eat them immediately (incredibly tasty and sweet), or put them in glasses and fill the glasses up with some good olive oil:

I like to eat mine on bread, with mozzarelly, or just like this. They also make for a very easy quick yet tasty dinner: boil pasta. Add tomatoes and oil. That’s it.

Enjoy!