The Best Meal I Ever Ate—Polenta with Italian Sausage and Red Bell Pepper

For those who live north of the 40^th parallel, the only way to survive winter is to crawl under an electric blanket and imagine that somewhere on this continent—somewhere like Florida—a Mad Housewife is basking on a wide white beach, the warm sun softening her moist skin with his devoted gaze.  She sips a Mad Housewife Wine spritzer, nibbles slices of mango, and languidly listens to seagulls and lapping waves. 

    Part of this fantasy is that you, too, may possibly go to this warm place, get on a plane with a bag of bikinis and murder mysteries, and three hours later be able to breathe again, a deep breath that doesn’t hurt your lungs and makes you want to run naked.  

    Dream on, my friends.

    Florida is cold.  Puddles that have never known ice opened their eyes this morning to thick bifocals.  The tomatoes in my garden are black deflated balloons, the banana trees, shriveled brown husks.  The swamp grass is frosted a hoary gray. I tear holes in old ski caps to make coats for the dogs, and I bundle up—two, three, four layers—to walk them. The whooping cranes that are expected to arrive from Wisconsin today may surprise their ultralight guides, turn up their beaks at our hospitality, and keep flying across the Gulf of Mexico to some warm tropical island.  

    This is not Florida.  No way.

    Yet there is one benefit to the cold—food tastes better.  After coming in out of the brisk air, you sit down to a streaming bowl of soup—soft potatoes and carrots, savory chunks of chicken or ham, springy noodles.  It warms your belly and fills your soul.  A hot roast comes out of the oven and you feel your blood pumping again.  The aroma of baking muffins warms you better than goose down.  And a bite of chocolate tastes like a miracle, as if you were a child in a bleak war-torn country and an American GI has just handed you your first Hershey bar.  It tastes like salvation.

    It seems the best meals I’ve eaten have been in winter.  Once I was in foothills of the Italian Alps just east of Lake Cuomo.  Oh, it was cold.  Four feet of snow piled on either side of a narrow twisting road.  The jeep was slipping and sliding, spinning off Ferris Wheels of snow as we glanced off the snow banks.  We didn’t know if we’d make it home.  Tired and hungry, we found a little Italian bistro on top of a hill.  It looked like a Tudor ski lodge, white stucco with dark wood timbers—like something out of Women in Love.  Inside a fire, and the smell of pine and roasting game.  The restaurant was empty except for the extended family eating near the kitchen, and some old men drinking wine by the fire.  The tables were covered with red and white checkered tablecloths.  Ice-framed window panes looked out over the snowy foothills.  There were only three dishes on the menu.  We ordered polenta, luscious bowls of steaming yellow corn mash piled high with Italian sausage on one side and stewed mushrooms on the other, served with a large bottle of Chianti.  We felt rescued.  The homemade sausage brought out the woodsy flavor of the mushrooms, and the sun in the corn.  Fortified, the cold no longer frightened us.

    M.F.K. Fisher wrote: “I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world."  Few pleasures come with the cold, but one is to cook up something hot and comforting, and serve it with a bottle of Mad Housewife wine.  Sharing a warm meal gives you courage and hope—together you can outlast the cold, you’ve done it before.  Another glass of Mad Housewife, please.

 

Polenta with Sausage and Red Bell Pepper 

 

Similar to grits, polenta is made from yellow corn, and can be silky like pudding, or firm like sponge cake.  Reconstructed from my memory of that feast in the Italian Alps, this recipe tastes just as creamy and satisfying as I remember.  Superb with Mad Housewife Cabernet Sauvignon. 

 

for sausage ragout:

 

1 pound good quality Italian sausage

1 onion, chopped

1 red bell pepper, sliced

8 ounces mushrooms, sliced

pinch red pepper flakes

½ teaspoon fennel seed

½ cup chicken stock

½ cup Mad Housewife Cabernet Sauvignon 

1/3 cup tomato sauce

¼ cup Italian parsley, chopped for garnish

 

for polenta:

 

2 tablespoons butter

¼ cup finely chopped onions

3 cups chicken stock

1 cup water

1 cup yellow cornmeal or Polenta meal

½ cup fresh grated Parmigiano Regiano cheese

½ teaspoon salt

 

1.     Peel skin off sausage, cut into chunks, and sauté with red pepper flakes until browned.  Add onions and cook until softened.  Add red bell pepper, mushrooms, fennel seed, chicken stock, wine, and tomato sauce.  Cover and cook on medium low for twenty minutes.  

2.     Start polenta.  (Note: You’ll be stirring at the stove for 20 minutes, so don’t expect to be able to leave the pot to tend to other things.)  Melt butter in sauce pan and sauté finely chopped onions.  Stir in chicken stock and bring to boil.

3.     Stir together water and corn meal in a separate bowl.  Gradually stir into the boiling stock.  Reduce heat to low and stir constantly with a wooden spoon until cornmeal is very thick and leaves the side of the pan as it is stirred.  About 20 minutes.

4.     Take off heat and stir in Parmigiano Regiano cheese and salt. 

5.     Pour polenta into warmed bowls and serve with sausage ragout.  Garnish with chopped parsley.

 

Comments

[Alex Staff]

If I were to ask about the best meal I ever ate, I would have to think for a day or two before answering… It's because all of 'em were made by my mother. Every meal she cooked for me was the best… I wish she can cook for me again, even though I know she already can't.