One of the fundamental experiences of living on your own is cooking. It’s usually cheaper to prepare meals from groceries than to eat out most of the time. A few times a week Samantha and I go to Conad, an Italian supermarket chain, to get ingredients and food. We go so often that we know the “radio bene insieme” jingle from the store radio, much to Samantha’s dismay.

Polenta was one of the Italian foods that I didn’t know of before studying abroad. I fell in love with polenta the first time I had it at one of Ganzo’s themed dinners: Future Florence Chef. Ganzo is the Florence University of the Arts student-run restaurant. The appetizer was a baked polenta cake topped with a cherry tomato, onions, sautéed chard, and cannellini beans. It must have been the texture that won me over.

The next time I had polenta was at Osteria Vecchi Sapori in Milan. I had cheesy polenta in a more liquid form. It was still delicious and wonderful.

Last week, I attempted to make polenta with seafood tomato sauce. Samantha and I got a box of instant polenta that cooks in eight minutes. Based on Daniel Gritzer’s article on Serious Eats, polenta should be cooked for at least 45 minutes or at least until the polenta achieves a creamy texture.

Tomato Sauce

Samantha sent me a tomato sauce recipe from The New York Times. After making fresh tomato sauce several times, I’ve learned that it’s very easy to make. We diced eight medium tomatoes and kept the skins. (I hate being wasteful, but I also understand that tomato skins take time to soften.)

After we cut the tomatoes, we put the tomatoes in a saucepan after sautéeing a minced garlic clove.

I boiled the tomatoes and allowed them to simmer on medium heat for about five minutes. We added seafood drained from a pack we got from Conad.

I mixed the seafood into the tomato sauce and allowed it to cook for five minutes on medium-high heat.

Polenta

As the tomato sauce was simmering, I cooked the polenta according to the directions on the package. I boiled 1.5 liters of water in a pot and then added the polenta.

I regret not immediately stirring the polenta because it solidified in the pot. No matter how much I stirred and broke the polenta into chunks, it was still clumpy. After cooking it for 10 minutes on medium heat, the wooden spoon was able to stand straight on its own in the pot.

Samantha added some cheese into the pot, and I mixed it.

We spooned polenta onto plates and spread some seafood tomato sauce on top.

Broccoli

I like having green in my meals so I steamed the rest of the broccoli we had. I cut the broccoli into smaller “stalks.” Fiber is wonderful.

After washing the broccoli, I put it in a small pan, added some water, covered it with a lid, and let it cook over medium heat.

Once it started steaming, I checked the texture with a fork. I added the broccoli to the plates.

I wish I had let the tomato sauce simmer longer, as it was soupier than I wanted it to be. In spite of this, the tomatoes were very savory. Fortunately, the seafood was the right amount of chewiness.

After Samantha and I refrigerated the leftover polenta, the polenta became a giant hardish chunk. I tried frying it for breakfast but it didn’t taste good. Even though I recently found a beautiful Buzzfeed list of polenta recipes, I don’t think I’ll try to make polenta for a while. When I do, I hope I can find it in my neighborhood supermarket in Queens.

Crafting into the sunset,
Virginia