cheese polenta, egg, red bell pepper

Polenta is made from popcorn kernels processed to powder and microwave with 3X the amount of water, bacon fat, and spices including habanero pepper. 

Old Mexico spicy shrimp with polenta

Shrimp and grits, 50% finely milled popcorn 50% masa harina for combined raw kernel powder, the whole popcorn kernels can be planted and they will grow (microwave popcorn will not work) but turned to powder instead, and alkali-treated kernels known as hominy, in Mexican cooking pulverized to masa harina (corn powder) for Old World Mexican aroma and flavor. Honestly, the half masa harina contributes an appealing warmth that regular untreated corn cannot match. It is an extraordinary flavor. It is what makes my shrimp and grits hold you and hug you intimately the whole time and makes you miss it when it is gone. Basically, corn porridge.

Warmth is a carelessly overused adjective in describing flavors so I resist using it now. I heard the same person say cinnamon adds warmth, cumin adds warmth, coriander adds warmth, clove adds warmth, turmeric adds warmth, garlic powder adds warmth causing all spice descriptions useless.

The same person has one single sign language motion, a hand squeeze cow-milking motion that describes everything from solid ice to cotton candy. Pitiful considering the individual prides her Italian heritage.

She also has delightfully perky breasts that everybody sees every episode and a physiologically anatomically impossibly broad smile that takes both hands and four widely spread fingers to imitate, and displays every single tooth in her mouth in full, repeatedly, but all that is irrelevant to warm earthy Old World Latin flavor of masa harina.  

Chicken ragù, polenta

Ragoûter, revive the taste. Ragoût, ragout, ragù, rags, ropa vieja.

Nyeah, what a dummkopf, what a nincompoop, what an ultra maroon, the whole idea was to make a chicken ragù using mushrooms and after all that I forgot to use mushrooms. 

Polenta, poached eggs, bacon

Polenta, poached egg

Corn meal.

This works with every grain that I've tried, dried bean and legumes, so things like dried garbanzo beans can be turned into hummus without soaking them overnight. In powder form, the starch absorbs water readily and the particles burst at boiling, or uncoil, and thicken immediately. My experience differs from what I read, I find there is no advantage to further cooking. As soon as it boils, it is ready to serve. 

So I get spices started in fat first because it goes so fast after that. 

The liquid is chicken stock. The mixture heated to boiling. It was too thick and too dense for my preference tonight so more stock was added and returned to the heat. Just to boiling and that's all, which amounted to a few minutes in the microwave.

Poaching an egg is easier than frying an egg.

Black beans with chicken, polenta

Grits. Corn meal mush. This is made with milled popcorn and masa harina. Chicken broth with butter is brought to a boil, double the amount of powders, then off the heat, the powders are mixed then back to the heat to boil, at that point it's done. 

Black beans and roasted chicken, a ton of my own chile flakes because they are mild this time so even more chile powder to kick up the heat factor, two additional chile powders, one cayenne and the other paprika for smoke. There is also rice in there that absorbed all of that, and roasted chicken from yesterday. 

Polenta, London broil, peach coulis

These are the things I'd like to punch cornmeal with, pow, right in the face. 

Leftover London broil

Cold so it stays pink

So there is a curious intrigue of hot and cold

Peach coulis is a peach dropped into a blender

Eggs, polenta, potatoes

Cornmeal 

Water 3 X the amount of cornmeal. My cornmeal is pulverized popcorn.

Butter, this butter has no salt.

Seasoning, salt pepper cayenne. That red powder from Granada is hotter than cayenne I wouldn't doubt if it was habanero, it's that scary hot. 

It's not done until it boils and when it boils it's done. It thickens as it cools eventually hardens. It is possible to cut it after it cools entirely and it can be fried. People do that. This is as slurry. The thickness can be controlled with more liquid even after it boils and cooks and cools and thickens. Cornmeal mush is versatile. 

The potatoes are parboiled in acidified water to strengthen the surface for frying in vegetable oil. They can be fried to crispy exterior with a soft fluffy interior. Try it sometime and see what that does.

The eggs are fried in butter. Swimming in it. Dripping with it. Barely on the heat. 

Poached egg on polenta with pecans

What to do with pecans, say, you happen have a big tree of them.

They do excellent things with extravagant flavors and I cannot keep off of those things so I tried my hand at turning something like that into a sauce. The mixture I came up with kept trying to turn into candy and I kept watering it down to sauce. I added cayenne because it seemed like they were asking for it. 

* honey, globs of honey, the sauce is mostly honey. 

* brown sugar, a tad, for its molasses, or maybe just use molasses.

* butter

* cayenne

* rice vinegar

* sea salt

* black pepper

* water

There is a sweet and sour thing going on. The aggressive sweetness of honey and brown sugar combined comes on like an attack and it is parried with salt and reposted with vinegar, the tricky cayenne is a froissement. Take that! You saccharine sauce, and calm down or I shall counterattack you a second time. 

Can you imagine having such a thing in a restaurant?  

Egg with polenta and meat sauce

This is better than I thought it would be. That's a nice surprise. No cheese and that is strange because I passed on three logical cheese opportunities. 

The corn is my favorite thing. I think it is considered nutritionally suspect. This is two types of corn combined, regular pulverized dent corn with everything in it, and masa harina for tamales. The combination is pleasant, I don't know why it is not famous. 

The sauce is a regular Bèchamel, the sort of thing you do for gravy, butter and flour in equal proportions and milk to form a sauce. Plus nutmeg. This has ground hamburger meat and a few other sausage-type spices.

My dad used to make a similar thing, an idea that he picked up from the military. He poured his hamburger sauce over toast and he called the combination SOS, which we were allowed to say, and which in the colorful and piquant and sometimes amusing nomenclature favored and perfected by military personnel is an acronym for shit on shingles, and would be a compliment to the chef, and another potty-mouth word we were not allowed to say. As kids we liked it just because of that -- we could say the letters and laugh about suggesting the forbidden words and still be well-behaved naughty little children -- but we probably would have liked it even if it had a nice name because it was bland and that is what we demanded. This is like that except tastier and much better. 

The SOS, now that I'm recalling it, was ghastly. I did try it a few times. Each time I was thinking the whole time that toast was wrong and so is the sauce. It was completely wrong. The toast gets strangely both soggy and difficult to cut. Eventually mush. So glop on top of  mush with edges that are difficult to cut. 

Do you know what? I take it back. I'm all wrong. Forget everything I just said. I am sorry. The stuff is probably still called SOS because it looks and tastes like shit and even airmen know it. 

I did something different with the hamburger meat too. Instead of breaking apart the hamburger or smashing it, the meat was pulled apart using two forks to gently separate it following the pattern made by the machine, the opposite of compression, to increase the browning surface. 

Once a bird came over from work and we were fixing up something together that involved hamburger. Her job was to stand there and brown the hamburger. She did what I told her to do. But I didn't tell her when to stop so she didn't stop. She reduced the hamburger to a particle size that impressed molecular scientists. <-- partial lie. There was no texture or sense of meat remaining, just a million tiny brown caramelized dots. <-- contains exaggeration. It occurred to me she had absolutely no idea what we were doing. <-- 100% of truth. 

That's not a bad thing, Persy. 

I mean, per se. 

It's just not anything I expected. 

Bacon, eggs, toast, polenta

The polenta is simply popcorn kernels ground to powder in a coffee mill.

No spices this time because I'm on a simplicity kick. And no chicken stock either even though there is a two-quart container of freshly made homemade stock waiting to be used. This does not make sense but can be understood as caprice. 

3/4 cup water was brought to a boil. The corn dust was added to the boiling water off the heat. Returned to boiling. Covered. Adjusted with water. Reheated. Adjusted with water. Reheated. Adjus ...  that déjà vu thing is happening all over the place again. 

This back-and-forth adjustments happened quickly with a microwave. Purists would have reason to object. [The purists who wrote the Colonix program instructions discouraged using the microwave to heat the water for their tea. Their tea is fierce. Two minutes over steeped and you'll be running for the bog. I obeyed their proscription even though the only reason given is that it affected the water. I didn't believe any of it but I went along.]

Scrambled eggs with avocado, polenta, cheese crackers

So now you see why I needed cheese crackers.

To make a stegosaurus.

What is it with boys and dinosaurs anyway?

It's a thing. Il est le petit garçon en lui, n'est-ce pas? Il aime jouer à un jeu de dinosaures.

These scrambled eggs will have avocado folded in at the end. Seasoned avocado.

I do not have any sour cream, any crème fraîche, any buttermilk, nor Mexican crema. But I do have yogurt, and I do have heavy cream.

Heavy cream is soured with lemon and my own mustard and seasoned with the same spice mixture that seasoned the cheese crackers. The citric acid thickens the cream more than it already is. Within a few minutes the cream becomes the consistency of familiar sour cream.

The sour cream does two things.

* It flavors the scrambled eggs as if they were a sauce. It is the same thing going on except a little farther than a sauce goes.

* Slams the brakes on the cooking action and reverses slightly the process of thickening the eggs. That is, the eggs are actually stiffened ever so slightly beyond the desired thickness and whisked back to sauce consistency with  the addition of sour cream.

It is important to have the emergency brakes ready at hand when the moment comes to halt the cooking action.

That is all there is to say except will you please stop playing with your food?

Polenta, eggs, shrimp and bacon

The polenta was done in the microwave. Go ahead, call the police. The deed is done, the crime against the culinary arts committed, and there is no undoing it, and it is delicious. It has curry. A cup or so of chicken broth, 3/4 teaspoon prepared curry, salt and pepper, cayenne and garlic, butter, and whatever you wish. This polenta is hot.

Ed: I forgot to mention this and it could be helpful. Pretty much any prepared curry will have stuff in it that does best started first in hot oil. The curry used here is colored with turmeric which does best staged later. So 3/4 teaspoon prepared curry is zapped with butter first. The butter melts, heats the curry.  Secondly, and this is not scientific it is my experience, these grains turned to powder, corn, wheat, rice, and even beans, all react very slowly in cold liquid. Not much absorption happens at all until the cooking liquid is boiling. Then it all happens at once.  So you might as well have the liquid boiling first then add the powder slowly while mixing it in to avoid clumps, then return to the heat for near instant boiling and thickening. Otherwise you could be standing there over a stove stirring a pot wondering when your grits are going to start to thicken when you could know that will not happen until the liquid boils then suddenly it happens at once. I do not know why 100 ℃ at sea level is the magical number, but it is.

Scrambled eggs whisked with butter as a sauce. A teaspoon of ricotta to finish.

The water for the shrimp never boiled. The heat was on the rise when I tossed in the frozen shrimp. Snapped off the heat but the heat persisted awhile anyway. It is an electric stove so not immediately responsive. I made the eggs in another tiny pot. When I was done the shrimp appeared to have denatured and turned color, and opaque throughout as far as I could tell. The temperature of the water had not changed. I think there was a battle of the rising and lowering temperatures there in the pot so that it all evened out. At any rate, the shrimp were cooked perfectly. 

I actually intended for the polenta and the eggs to be firmer, but this worked out fine. When I tasted it I as amazed. When I was done I wanted more. It's nice to know the extra polenta is right there to use anytime. Then it will be firmer. It does that when it cools and another chance is given to decide how wet you want the reheated curried polenta.

The bacon goes with the polenta and scrambled eggs as sauce and shrimp, but tonight it is on a separate plate. The food stylist and the cook had a blow out argument about that and then the photographer chimmed in. It was awful, they were yelling and hissing angry sweary words. Then the diner pipped up and added his impotent 2¢ on the matter and flounced off complaining about the whole thing had gone cold. But the plate has a metal rim and cannot be reheated so the entire thing had to be carefully slid onto an ordinary plate that could go into a microwave for 30 seconds. And as those four people happen to be myself you can imagine how I felt behind all of that. So for art the bacon was kept on a separate plate.