Polenta, steak

ARTS !

Home milled dent popcorn and half a rib-eye steak.

The sturdy coffee bean mill used to turn ordinary  popcorn to powder has a steel bowl. The previous three coffee bean mills were cheaper and less rugged and so buckled under heavy use and the warranty-voiding kitchen hack of milling hard corn kernels.

The steak is half a rib-eye thawed yesterday. I like the wildly seasoned polenta more than I like the steak.  I picked at the steak and wasted some.

Polenta, corn meal mush, yellow unhusked grits, are all the same thing and they are nothing like anything else when loaded heavily with pantry spices. Butter and spices first in the pot and then corn meal with at least twice the liquid. A Cayenne boost or some other serious capsicum is essential in my cornmeal mush world. A reliable prepared curry of some complexity substitutes for opening up the separate tins of a masala daba and combining the usual spices oneself, so the prepared curries are laziness basically. 

Spicy polenta:

*  1 tbsp butter

*  1 tsp prepared curry

*  1/2 teaspoon cayenne chile powder

*  1/2 teaspoon garlic powder.

*  1+1/4 cup broth of any sort even water

*  1/2 cup corn meal

Method: Melt butter in pot with spices.  Add broth. Drizzle dry corn meal while whisking. Bring to boil. 

The cornmeal swells in the liquid and tends to stick to the bottom of the pot but the mixture will not fully thicken until the liquid boils and then the transformation is immediate. If the corn is milled to a fine powder then it is finished at boiling, if the milled corn is coarse then further boiling on low is necessary.