Last night's whirlwind in the kitchen yielded a big mess, but also some pretty good eats too. Part of the reason for the chaos was that I had two new recipes that I used as building blocks, but the rest was sort of figured out on the fly. While it can be fun to cook on the fly, it can also lead to a lot of disorganization. In any case, dinner was a success and that's the ultimate goal.
I started out knowing I wanted to make a polenta dish with wild mushrooms. It was my intention to try this dish from Cooking Light, using wild mushrooms. It looked easy and tasty - great. Only my jar of Alfredo sauce in the fridge was moldy, I was out of Fontina cheese and I forgot to buy basil. Hmmmm. Not to be deterred, I scrounged up some sharp provolone and a bit of cream - I could still make a go of something tasty. The end result was very tasty, but the sharpness of the provolne overwhelmed the wild mushroom flavor, so my first choice, Fontina, would have indeed been a better choice with may just a touch of sharp provolone thrown in.
The collard greens were an impluse buy, mostly due to the lack of spinach in the stores. I had a notion that I wanted to use prosciutto with them, so I searched the internet and found this recipe on Epicurious that I used as a base - scaling it WAY down as we were only cooking 1 pound, not 4! Shockingly enough, DH liked these better than I did. They were pretty good, but there was something I didn't like - I'm not sure if it was the greens themselves or if something was lacking in the seasoning. The boys tolerated it pretty well and the youngest even proclaimed them very good - however, he needed encouragement to finish them all, so I'm not sure what he really thought of them.
Time to get back in the kitchen and get cooking again. Something tells me that tomorrow night will definitely be a leftover night............
Tags: polenta, wild mushrooms, collard greens, Epicurious, Gourmet, recipe, food
I added a couple strips of leftover bacon, and instead of the vinegar, I used juice from lemon, which we grow in our yard. I found the dish delish.
ReplyDeleteP.S. I hope I don't publish this twice accidentally. :"> I think I goofed up, somehow...all I wanted to do was say that I really liked this recipe. dang.