Thanksgiving Offering

… and then I assembled it all together with more ingredients:

Round Three. (Continuing the work of the night before… (click images for larger view.))

So here is another group of ingredients. These are largely the vegetables that will accompany the polenta and the salsa roja I made the night before. Notice that the polenta has been sliced into 24 triangles, ready for the next step. Those are red bell pepper choppings in front, along with majoram and cilantro. Mushrooms being suatéed in olive oil- what a lovely smell that always produces! After some minutes, half of the garlic is added, and then after another 5 minutes or so I put everything aside in a bowl. Then on to the zucchini (or “courgette” – I used half a yellow and half a green, for variety), suatéing again for about five minutes with the remaining garlic going in, and the peppers. I sprinkled about a teaspoon of cayenne pepper into it too. Then a few minutes later, the heat goes off and I put back in the mushrooms and toss it all together with the herbs (leaving a little for a garnish).

Next, the final assembly, beginning with lining the bottom of the 9×13 baking dish with the salsa roja. Then the triangles are arranged in overlapping rows. Then the vegetables are gently spooned into the gaps, distributing as evenly as possible. Finally, I grated a cup and a 1/4 of smoked mozzarella and sprinkled that over the whole thing, and popped it all into the oven that I’d pre-heated to 375 F.

Here it is before it went in:

and 30 minutes later I took it out of the oven (a bit early) and let it cool for a bit and then popped it, the extra herbs for the garnish, and myself into the batmobile and dashed (carefully – no sharp braking!) across the city to my friends’ place. There, it found a little space in an oven full of goodies, and ten minutes later, this was the result (I forgot to add the herb garnish – drat!):

This is the Baked Polenta Gratin with Salsa Roja from the aforementioned lovely book Field of Greens by Annie Somerville, and you can find precise details there, although it is pretty straightforward to wing a variation of it yourself from the basic structural ideas seen here.

The result? It was tasty, and people liked it. Hurrah!

-cvj