Made a nice vegetarian dinner with Dana and Seth last night. Well Dana and I made dinner - Seth washed the dishes, and opened the wine, which was from Oregon. (Lightest Pinot Noir ever - very nice.) For some reason all the food looks super shiny in the picture - probably the super-bright environmentally-friendly but terribly unflattering light bulb in our kitchen. But it was actually of a normal, healthy sheen and quite delicious.
I've been trying to use up a bag of fine yellow cornmeal for months, so we've made polenta twice now. First time was on Dana and Seth's alternate first date. They were going to go get sushi at a nice restaurant in Wayland Square, but then it was blizzarding. Sushi didn't seem like an adequate reason to walk 20 minutes in multiple feet of snow, so they decided to eat here. But since we hadn't gone grocery shopping in ages, I was enlisted to help make something out of the random ingredients we did have in the kitchen. Wound up making polenta with grilled asparagus and red peppers, plus a nice little salad of caramelized red onions and walnuts with sliced apples and blue cheese. It was surprisingly good, for a this-is-what-was-in-the-kitchen meal. I've made the salad again several times.
So we did polenta again last night, but as we were actually going grocery shopping, we picked up some mushrooms and an onion to go on top. Threw them together with some finely chopped sun dried tomatoes, cheap white wine leftover from our last meal together (asparagus risotto) and some herbs from the cabinet. (There were dozens of spice jars here when we moved in, and I'm still finding ones I didn't know were there.)
We cooked the polenta with some toasted pine nuts, then cut it into triangles and fried it in oil. And as we forgot to get something green to go with it, we wound up making asparagus again. Always good.
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