Day 13 - A Recipe I Need to Tweek a Little

Simple Tomato Sauce, the out-of-season version (pg 264)

Polenta Torta (pg 95)

served with mixed greens dressed with clean-out-the-frig dressing gussied up

Ya live, ya learn. Or not. Since Monday, Tuesday and Thursday of this week are all pretty much shot in the nether region, I hit the ground running at 6:30 this morning. Unpacked and washed and put away a ton of dish (we own 7 or 8 tons all together). Did a mountain of laundry. Carried dozens and dozens of boxes of stuff upstairs. And still planned on making Polenta Torta for dinner. When will I learn to ALWAYS read through all the recipes FIRST?! Turns out that it takes some time to make the polenta and I still wanted to get another load of boxes from storage and maybe get to the Atascadero farmers market.

Shoot. Time was growing short. So I decided to just make the torta with store-bought pre-prepared polenta. Searched the Von's supermarket about 3 times before finally tracking down an employee to help. No polenta! The store had NO POLENTA!! Went to the Albertson's, which is huge. Went to customer service. Four additional employees and 1 store manager later, someone finally managed to find one roll of polenta. What the hell do these people eat in this town??? For all that, I could have stayed home and made the darned stuff from scratch. OTOH, I did get another load of boxes from storage. That's something. And dinner was on the table at 7 p.m., not 11 p.m. as it otherwise might have been.

I made the torta with the out-of-season canned-tomato version of Simple Tomato Sauce, and used the hard-won store-bought polenta, adding sauteed sliced mushrooms to the sauce. It was darned tasty, but my tomato sauce was way too runny. Less of the canning liquid, or some roux to thicken the sauce, or time to reduce it, or something. Or run it through the blender. Or use fresh tomatoes when in season. Something. The torta was pretty runny. Using from-scratch polenta would have helped, too. So, this one I need to make again with a thicker sauce.

However, the end product was delicious. Even with 5 cloves of garlic, the overall flavor was mild. I thought that was a nice change from the highly-flavored foods we're all used to. We forget what simple food tastes like.

I just tweeked some bottled salad dressing to put over greens. There are things in the fridge I want to get rid of and I'm too cheap to just throw them out. With a little fresh lime juice squeezed onto the whole thing and some red Hawaiian salt sprinkled about, the salad was pretty good. Okay, not my best meal so far, but not a total melt-down either.

I probably won't be cooking tomorrow since I have to go back up to San Mateo to retrieve Maizie. The report is that she's done very well while at Radiocat. I'm not surprised. Maizie is about the most easy-going cat I've ever known. She's a total sweetheart.

Carry on, loyal readers.

That's 11 recipes down and 294 to go.