Ma's Home Cooking...or is she?

The first time I ever encountered polenta on a menu in a restaurant, I almost laughed out loud. It was listed as part of an entree, and the description made it appear as if the polenta was a gourmet delicacy from northern Italy.

Give me a break.

Growing up, polenta was often my nonna's answer to potatoes. One of her tastiest dishes was what we kids called "chicken with the red gravy" - a chicken cacciatore - (to most Italians, 'gravy' is our word for 'sauce'). A nice serving of polenta topped with chicken with the red gravy -mmmm - it doesn't get much better.

Polenta is one of the simplest of dishes. It consists of water, salt and corn meal. Period. Its simplicity is what makes it so versatile - it is improved and elevated to greater heights by what you put on top, usually something with a tomato base. Also, you can punch it up by adding grated cheese as it nearly cooked, but a nice sprinkle of asiago, parmesan or romano on top will do just fine.

I've learned that there are a few tricks to making good polenta. You want it to be firm but not dry. Too soupy and it is useless. I vaguely remember it took a while for Nonna's polenta to cook, but she was usually making enough to feed a small army. My recipe - from start to finish - is for a smaller portion and takes about 15 minutes tops.

It's interesting how some things become popular or in demand. Anything to do with Tuscany has been the rage since Under the Tuscan Sun. When we were young, few Americans used olive oil in cooking - now it's worth its weight in gold and comes in different flavors. Pesto (Nonna's kitchen always smelled of basil and garlic), zucchini flowers, tiramisu, espresso, veal saltimbocca, prosciutto - and don't get me started on gnocchi - we had all these things growing up. In many cases they are simple things that our grandparents had as staples that helped to stretch meals. My mom told me that when she was a girl, lunch often consisted of a slice of Italian bread spread with gravy (tomato sauce) and maybe some cheese sprinkled on top. Since her family owned Nuti Bakery in Chicago, they were never without bread. I'm sure Nonna fed quite a few kids in the Taylor Street neighborhoods with this version of Depression pizza.

Here's my polenta recipe:

Bring to boiling in a saucepan

3 cups of water

1-1/2 teaspoons salt

Gradually stir in a mixture of

1 cup yellow corn meal

1 cup COLD water

Continue boiling, stirring constantly, until mixture is thickened. Cover, lower heat (to the lowest) and cook slowly 10 minutes or longer, stirring occasionally. (I've never gone over ten minutes.) Transfer cooked polenta to a warm platter and top with your favorite dish such as chicken cacciatore, tomato sauce with sausage and mushrooms, or roasted red peppers with garlic.

It is very important that the water mixed with the corn meal be very cold. I've even put some crushed ice in the water, but make sure it is no more than one cup combined.

To get the smooth look of the polenta in the picture, I pour the cooked polenta into a rounded pyrex dish to let it set. Then I invert it onto a platter.

Happy 4th

It was the 4th of July, 1960. I was nine years old and my family was in the process of moving from Chicago's Austin area to the nearby suburb of River Grove. We spent the day at my Aunt Alice's house - her family was already in RG, moving from Chicago's west side.

I'm sure there was lots of food, maybe the adults played cards, watched baseball on tv or just visited together while we five girls (my two sisters, my two cousins and I) probably spent the day entertaining ourselves with games of hide and seek or tag in the empty lot next door to Alice's house. It was space that was part of the property - the biggest yard we had ever seen. Coming from apartment living, we reveled in the space that the lot afforded us. We immediately found it to be where we could run ourselves silly, then collapse on the back steps of the house, panting and sweating with bright red faces. The lot was nothing but grass but it was our own private playground.

Over the years we would expand our repertoire of activities in that lot to softball (using chunks of concrete from a busted up sidewalk for bases), bocce, spud and in the back, creating a teeter-totter out of an old plank with a hole in the middle that we positioned over some kind of pipe that stuck out of the ground in the yard. The thought of impaling ourselves on such a contraption never entered our minds as we rode up and down and spun each other around on it. We wore away the grass to a fine dust and then ran through the sprinkler to wash away the dirt and grimy sweat. Eventually, Alice would get an above-the-ground pool and summer weekends would take on a whole new aspect of fun in the sun.

On that first 4th of July, both our families were new to the village and didn't know much about how everyone celebrated. After supper as darkness fell, our parents sat around the kitchen table having coffee, sweets, cigarettes and probably a few punccinos (coffee, whiskey or rum, lemon and sugar). We kids were out in the lot, catching lightning bugs and getting mosquito bites. My uncle might have brought out a bag of sparklers he picked up on his routes as a truck driver and we lit them off as our moms watched nervously. They would go back in for another pot of coffee and left us to our games outside, even though it was late and the street lights were already on.

My cousin Carol is about ten months older than I am. Often, growing up, we escaped our younger siblings and would go off together just walking and talking - forming a special bond as each other's first friends since birth that we still have. That night, as the others went back in, Carol and I heard thumping sounds coming from not too far away - the sounds of fireworks. We followed the sounds to as far as we were allowed to go, the corner of Thatcher and Greenwood. We looked to the west and a little north and could see the brilliant colors of the display just above the trees that were going off at Gideon's Field - a place where most of the people in our town were enjoying the final celebration of the day.

Carol and I stood on the corner and watched enviously, wishing we could be there or at least just a little closer. Then we managed to climb onto the mailbox that stood near the sidewalk, straddling it like two kids on a horse and giving us just a little bit more height to catch sight of the reds, whites and blues as they exploded nearly a mile away.

We were two city kids who had lived on very busy streets in Chicago. We found the quiet of this little suburb very different but we didn't miss the sounds of the "L" train behind the house going through the alley or the ambulances speeding south on Laramie. We had a lot of exploring to do, a new school where we would start fifth grade together in a couple months, and being a lot closer geographically than we had in the past. We wouldn't need our fathers to drive us to each others' homes - we could just walk during the day, but when our dads were home, we would end up driving the six blocks anyway.

That night atop the mailbox, we craned our necks to see the finale explode in the night's sky. The colorful sparkles above the trees stopped and we knew it was over; it was a fitting end to the day's activities. We slid off the box down to the sidewalk and walked back to the house. We told our parents what we had seen, and we knew that next year, we wouldn't be watching from a far away corner. We would be joining the throngs with a blanket and folding chairs, sitting on the damp grass with family and neighbors, ohhing and ahhing with each explosion. Then, still smelling the smoke in the air, we'd make our way back to Alice's for another pot of coffee and another game in the lot.