Polenta: A Seasonality-Friendly Standby

Featuring whatever veggies are in season and delightful green sauce that you buy instead of making.

Welcome to a recipe post for paid subscribers! This almost-too-easy dinner is great for whatever produce looks appealing at the market this week. Next Tuesday, all subscribers will receive a recap of the natural wine trip I went on in May. As always, check out my past posts here and learn more about my day job here. Thanks for reading!

I love to cook (obviously), but there are some nights I wish dinner would cook itself. It’s not that I don’t want to cook. It’s that I don’t want to decide what to cook. My dream scenario is for someone (Colin) to walk up to me and say “I want this for dinner” and then to have everything I need to make that thing available to me instantly. All I’d need to worry about, in this dream world, is making the actual thing—my favorite part.

Of course, that is not likely to happen most nights. But it becomes far *more* likely to happen if you keep things like cornmeal in your pantry. Cornmeal, which becomes polenta when cooked, is great for nights where decision fatigue threatens to take over. It can be baked into cornbread or turned into pancakes for breakfast for dinner or made into this dish: polenta with a roasted vegetable of your choice.

Tips

• I call for pesto in this recipe, and though I have a fabulously freeform recipe for pesto on this very website that doesn’t even have a paywall on it, I’m going to go ahead and encourage you to use store bought pesto if that’s what you’re feeling. For this recipe, I’ve also used all manners of other premade sauces, from Nam Prik Pao from Pink Salt Kitchens to the Cilantro Chutney made by the folks at Maazah.

• This recipe makes a LOT of polenta—so much that my household of 2 people can make it last for days. One of my favorite ways to use it up is to stir a bunch of shredded sharp cheddar into it, put it into a baking tin, and whack it in the oven for a few minutes. All of the sudden, it’s a new, exciting mac-and-cheese-ish dish for lunch.

• As with most of my recipes, you can and should swap out the veggies for whatever you have. This photo, for example, features Brussel sprouts and asparagus, but I’ve also made this recipe in deep winter with mushrooms and kale. Go wild, kids!

Polenta with Crispy Brussel Sprouts and Pesto