Breakfast Polenta Recipe

I freaking LOVE to eat polenta!  Usually, I eat it as it's in its mushy state... Instead of a heap of pasta or mashed potatoes, I'll opt for polenta to be the bottom against my sauce's meaty top. Heh heh.

Last week, I had a vegan dinner party and decided to use polenta as a crust for my cottage pie.  (It was yummy and I was lazy!).  I was left with about 2 cups of yummy corny awesomeness to use later.

The first thing that I did was to unmold it and consider my options.

Then I sliced it into pieces, added a little olive oil to a hot pan, and got to work! I think it was about 5 minutes before I needed to flip.

They started looking better!

Not all flipping was successful.

It really started to get awesome after a few minutes on the other side.  A cast-iron skillet is the way to go.

After a tiny sprinkling of salt, I was ready to eat! This was a very filling, happy, and satisfying breakfast that I can't wait to make again sometime.

 (Oops: here's the recipe! Take 2 cups of polenta {1/2 cup of cornmeal stirred into 2ish cups of boiling water; add seasonings of your choice}, pour it in a container & allow to chill overnight or longer, unmold, cut into strips, and cook with about a teaspoon or two of olive oil, high heat, about 5 minutes per side. You can flip again to lock in the polenta-y goodness, but that's optional. Dash with salt, serve, and eat!)

Keeping Those Monster Cereals Fresh!

I'm the type of person who loves Halloween.  I mean, loooooves it!!  (You can tell by all of the cool pumpkin and Halloween-related shit that I post here.)  When the the General Mills Monster Cereals became "restricted" to seasonal items only, I was super sad.  But, when it becomes available once again, I get very happy.

One thing that I do not looooove, though, is trying to reduce my carbs.  I have recently lost about 25 pounds, and I still have many more pounds ahead of me.  So, when the craving for something sweet hits me, cereal can often hit the spot (Count Chocula, I'm specifically looking in your direction!).

My biggest problem with all cereals is that, by the time they get to the end of the box, they're all stale and yucky and gross.  Plus, I hate cereal dust!  I've fixed this problem by biting the bullet & buying plastic "snack bags" for those days when I need to take my food with me.  They work great with cereal, too, for those times when plunging a hand into the cereal box and scarfing down who-knows-how-many grams of sugar just isn't going to cut it.

I am storing my single-serve "100 calorie packs" in the boxes that the cereal came in.  After these are done, I'll get some Frankenberry and maybe even some Fruit Brute!  These will ensure that my breakfast is fresh and spooky for weeks and weeks to come! :)

The Incredible Edible Vegg!

I came across a recipe for vegan egg yolks on The Airy Way.  Usually I just do a tasty tofu scramble with my "secret ingredients," but I thought Zoa's take on vegan egg-style meal was really innovative!  The pictures were so tempting, and the idea of making a tofu "egg white" with a yellow "yolk" just couldn't be filed away for too long.  And yes, there was a footnote about people finding the ingredients to be "gross" -- which, I must admit, I kinda did!  But my curiosity outweighed the gross factor, and I'm so glad it did, because I discovered that it's actually pretty good.  So try it, maybe you'll like it too!

Here are the ingredients from Zoa's blog:

Vegan egg yolk (makes 2 yolks)

1/2 tbsp Veganaise
1/2 tbsp carrot juice (if you don't have carrot juice, just finely grate a carrot and squeeze the juice out of it)
2 tbsp vegetable broth (or 2 tbsp water and 1/4 tsp nutritional yeast)
1 tbsp Earth Balance*
1 tsp cornstarch

(*Admittedly, I did not vegan-ize this recipe all the way.  All I had was "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter," please don't be mad at me!)

The real technique can be found if you click on the Airy Way link above.  The recommended microwaving time is in 5-second increments, which I failed to remember while I was doing my cooking (I had only written down the ingredients.)  As it was, I just mixed everything together -- using the water/nutritional yeast method -- and microwaved it in 20 second increments, whisking the hell out of it after each pass.  I think it took me two 20-second passes in the microwave.  You might need a third, depending on how hot your microwave cooks.  Or you can just follow Zoa's directions and do it correctly. ;)

After I first mixed everything together, I must admit that it that it looked pretty ho-riffic.  I began to have some second thoughts, but decided to press on!

Yeah, it's not a pretty picture.  If it looks like this, you're (unfortunately)
 doing it right.  But... keep going.  It gets better, I promise! :)

After the first 20-second pass in the microwave, I whisked the hell out of it, then did another pass.  It mellowed into a beautiful golden egg-yolk yellow shade.  The consistency was smooth and velvety, with just a hint of lumps from the carrot I grated to get the carrot juice.  And incidentally, I would not recommend omitting the carrot juice from this recipe; I must admit that I don't taste it much at all, but it really does help impart a beautiful eggy color to the finished product.

Somehow, everything melted and melded together
into a beautiful "vegg yolk" starter!

Zoa carved a hole into the tofu and then in a separate post (here) recommended microwaving the tofu before filling the hole with the "yolk" -- it makes the wet tofu give up its water a lot more efficiently, and become more eggy in texture.  I carved my yolk holes, and did my best to shape the tofu.  Mine weren't even remotely as pretty as hers, but hey, I tried!

Yum!  It's not just for breakfast anymore!

The blog posting also recommended that the yolk mixture made a good sauce on its own as well, so for the rest of my 'fu, I made another batch -- only this time, at the end, I added a dash of Montreal seasoning and a packet of True Lemon.  Viola... I Can't Believe It's Not Hollandaise! ;)

All in all, I'd give this experiment a good solid B+.  I'll give it another shot sometime and make it an even better grade in the future.