Human food not fish bait

Went out for my walk this morning and it is very clear to me that autumn is definitely here to say, and what follows this season is the one many of us dread, while others make the best of winter. As I returned home I walked around the back of the house, picked some of the Swiss Chard from the garden, and a few of the yellow cherry tomatoes, one of those to items would become a part of my breakfast, which I had been thinking about during my walk. Today it would be something totally experimental, and therefore in my books fun. I wanted something warm, filling and good for me, on this what had turned into a cloudy and rainy Montreal day.

Some childhood memories

When I was young there were two uses for corn meal, one was for eating and the other was as a bait for carp fishing. Anytime I cook up Mămăligă or what the Hutsuls in the Carpathian mountains would call Banosh, conjures up some great memories of spending time with my father in the kitchen, be it because we were making breakfast together, or because I knew that we would be using that mămăligă as bait for fish, a type of fish that most of North American's simply didn't understand, nor seemed to care very little about as a food source. Somehow, there is a stigma about eating fish that are bottom feeders, though this is really selective discrimination, because while carp dos fit into this category of fish, no one seems to have a problem with eating bass, cod, halibut or sole. 

 

For anyone who has ever fished pound for pound a carp will put up one heck of a battle once hooked. Over the years that my father started fishing for carp in Canada, even before I was a twinkle in his eye, he understood that mămăligă could serve as bait for these fish. Over time the method of preparation of it as fish bait varied, from ensuring it was a gummy paste that would hold it's form around the fairly large hooks, or a combination of cooking it with cornstarch and baking it into like a one centimetre thin pancake. The later method seemed to work much better and held its form better than any of the other methods I remember us using when fishing for carp. 

 

In short mămăligă to me is what many others in the English speaking world would call polenta. The way I have developed to cooking it over the years for human consumption is much different than its preparation to be used when fishing for carp, but it might also get you hooked. Though my father's method seemed to serve its function well, because we would catch some one to two dozen carp during the fishing season, where probably just as thrilled of our mămăligă, until they realized they were hooked, as I am when cooking it now with a totally different purpose in mind.

The goods and process

Unlike banosh, I used to make while still living in Ukraine, mămăligă and polenta are both prepared on a water based liquid which could be a vegetable or other broth, or in many cases simply water. Polenta is primarily corn meal however, I like to do a few different things with it other than simply cook it up and eat it as a porridge, and that is what I did this morning.

There are plenty of different types of polenta from slow cook to quick and ready in a very short period. I happened to have just enough for an nice wholesome meal. While we haven't hit any sub freezing temperatures in Montreal yet, there is this certain dampness that is starting to permeate our lives and this being the case, I decided this morning that I would be using the oven as part of my brunch creation. I turned the oven up to 375 degrees Fahrenheit before I started the prep of all my other ingredients. Remember, timing is extremely important in the execution of any project – and this includes cooking. In doing so it would and a bit of warmth to our kitchen along with the fragrance of something that would get my olfactory glands working and ready to enjoy a meal well deserved.

The other things included here on this day are simple things, as I have posted in places, that I love simple foods that anyone can cook and not something that will break your bank.

Unlike some things that take a long time to prepare, polenta even the slow cook type can be fulling cooked in between 6-8 minutes from my experience. So today we have no long or short cook parameters. I had a lovely wholesome meal in about 35 minutes total, and I don't mind spending the time because I find preparation of food to be a healing and meditative process.

Olive oil – about a table spoon

Polenta – corn meal – 1/2 cup

Yellow onion – 1 medium - yeild about 2/3 of a cup diced

Swiss Chard stems – about 1/4 of a cup chopped into 1/4 inch pieces

Turmeric – 1/4 teaspoon or to colour and flavour

Eggs – 2 medium

Unsalted butter – about a table spoon

Cayenne pepper – just a smidgen

Basil – fresh leaves about a tablespoon when finely chopped

Before having started to cook my polenta, I diced up my onion and cut off the stems of the Swiss Chard which I had picked from the garden. In a six inch diameter cast iron skillet, I started cooking the onions in about half table spoon of olive oil, nice and slowly, they would continue to cook later together with everything else in the oven. Shortly after adding my polenta to the boiling water I added the stems of the Swiss Chard to the now softening onions. I could see how the natural dies of the chard began to effect the colour of the onions. It only took about two to three minutes to that point, once the two ingredients had somehow come together naturally, it was time to turn off their heat source.

It is such experiences that help us understand now our ancient ancestors began to understand how to colour the cloth that they had began to weave into clothing could be changed by the natural dyes in certain plants. Many of us take too much for granted in this day and age, and as a result we make big problems out of those that should not exist at all.

Just to the point before when my polenta was about half cooked I emptied the cup or so that I had with the remaining liquid into the mixture of my onions, chard and turmeric. I mixed all this up ensuring that it was all one nice mass, the polenta becoming that kind of more of an orange colour then the yellow of the turmeric. While mixing the ingredients together I added the other half table spoon of olive oil, knowing that this would be going into an oven and wanting to be able to separate it all from its cast iron baking vessel.

With my wooden spatula I carefully hollowed out two little trenches, or maybe hen holes would be a more appropriate term as I would be laying one egg into each of these. Once I broke the egg shell and place the egg and its yolk in the first hen hole, I could see how the latent heat was cooking the egg white. I repeated the process with the second egg, and then like a mother turtle covered my eggs with the polenta from around the sides of the skillet. Once I was ensured that they were covered and safe from the demons of the oven world, I placed my dollop of butter between those two little mounds and topped it off will a little cayenne pepper.

Into the oven it went! And baked for for just about 18 minutes at max. Had I wanted runny yolk eggs, 12 minutes would have been sufficient. In any case, experiment and have fun in your kitchen. Don't be afraid to try new things. New foods, new spices; something simpler in our very complicated world.