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My mother used to make what I now know to be…polenta. There wasn’t a very large Italian population in South Dakota, probably still isn’t. So, we just didn’t know about things like polenta. So, unknowingly she made polenta, or cornmeal “mush”. Continue reading
Grits are Southern comfort food. I was never that enamoured with them, until I had grits with cream and cheese added. OH, yeah! So good and so versatile. You can eat them as is, with a nice plop of butter, melting and oozing into the grits, or use them as a side, instead of rice or mashed potatoes, or sprinkled with bacon.
This is a wonderfully flavored rice, with the beans cooked with the rice. It’s pretty AND it’s delicious…win-win! If you’re vegetarian, this can be a main course, but I like to serve it with Jerked Chicken.
Whaaaaat? Clementines, in fried rice? There are all sorts of recipes in Asian cooking that use orange/Mandarin/tangerine. Orange chicken? Tangerine Beef (or chicken)? So why not fried rice? Oh, you noticed the bacon, too, did you?
Peruvian cuisine is wonderful. If you have a Peruvian restaurant near you, and haven’t tried it. Go. Go right now. Peruvian roast chicken is magic and magically delicious. But today we’re making Chaufa Rice, Peru’s version of Chinese fried rice. It’s simple. It’s delicious. And it also happens to be a great way to use leftover chicken or pork, if you don’t have fresh.
Risotto is so good. It’s a one-pot meal, The Spicy Honey likes it and well, it seemed like just the thing for dinner tonight. At the store, the shrimp looked great, so the plan came together. Don’t you just love when that happens?
I was thinking about making sushi, but just didn’t get myself organized enough to manage that. This is sushi, but “unrolled” or deconstructed—layers of flavor. This is fork food. Chopsticks won’t work too well here, but the flavors are deliciously sushi.
At our house, rice pudding is a HUGE comfort food. Right up there with tapioca pudding, but that’s another post. And then, there’s pumpkin pie, all spicy and creamy. And around this time of year, pumpkin pops up in everything, so I decided to combine these two comforts. Why not? And just in time for Thanksgiving, too.
Unless your roots lie in Italy, polenta may be pretty unfamiliar. It certainly was for The Goddess. But, she’s a convert. This is a great starting place, if you’ve never made polenta. You can do this and polenta with corn and cheese is just so delicious.
This is, at its heart, the shrimp bisque you’re familiar with. But I was feeling the Carnaval vibe, given the time of year, and the shrimp looked so tasty, so I decided to jazz up the regular old bisque with some Brazilian flavors. It worked. And The Spicy Honey loved it. Lent won’t be all about sacrifice, after all!