Creamy Grits are a Satisfying Go-With



Creamy Grits by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

 Let's be clear: I was born in the South, I live in the South, and I will love grits 'til my dying day. Growing up, quick white grits with a puddle of butter were a Sunday morning treat alongside scrambled eggs and bacon. My husband introduced me to his ritual of crumbling bacon into the grits for a salty, smoky crunch.

Before the girls came along, I would come home some nights, dead tired from work, put on jammies and fix a bowl of grits, sprinkle them with shredded Cheddar cheese and eat them in front of Thursday night's Must-See-TV. These days, I still turn out grits for breakfast, but I've expanded my options and use grits the way Italian cooks use polenta - as a foil for rich stews such as ratatouille.

Here's my recipe for creamy grits. You can use regular quick grits (never instant!), or the sunny yellow grits made by Dixie Lily.

Creamy grits

2 cups water

1 cup chicken broth

1 cup milk

1 cup grits

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Cheddar cheese, cream cheese, butter and other goodies, p.r.n.


1. In a medium saucepan, preferably nonstick, combine all liquids and place over medium heat. Slowly whisk in grits. Bring to a simmer, whisking occasionally, and cook until the grits are smooth and free of lumps.

2. Stir in cheese, if using, and butter and seasonings. Serve with breakfast or as a base for ratatouille.

Summer's Best Stew: Ratatouille



Ratatouille and creamy grits by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books



I've returned to the kitchen, my source for solace in the late summer. The light through the window is changing, it's amber coming through at a different angle, backlighting the spider web on the porch.

Spider web by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

My soul seeks comfort food, but my warm house isn't quite ready for day-long braises and Dutch ovens bubbling over with stewed chicken and bready dumplings. Ratatouille, thick with chunks of eggplant swimming in fresh tomato, I've found, speaks to my soul and lets me walk away from the table without needing a starch-induced nap.




Eggplants by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books


There are at least two approaches to preparing ratatouille: the one-pot method, where each item is chopped and added to the pan gradually. This yields a tasty, but homogeneous stew. My preferred method requires roasting some of the vegetables, namely the eggplant, to give some textural variety to the final product. My recipe is evolving, first with the boilerplate recipe in the "Gourmet Cookbook," now tweaked by Francis Lam’s primer on Salon.com (previously published at Gourmet.com.) It is, to use Lam’s phrase, so good you’ll want to punch a hole in the wall (but please, don’t, somebody‘s mother will have to fix that.)

Redneck Ratatouille

I tend use whatever quantities of these vegetables I have on hand, given the general guidelines in the recipe. I’ve used roasted Poblano peppers and assorted banana and chili peppers instead of or in addition to the bell peppers. Just be mindful of the heat factor when cooking with the spicy peppers.

2 medium eggplant, peeled and diced into 1-inch pieces

Salt

1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil

4 large garlic cloves, peeled and smashed

3 large onions, peeled, halved, each half cut into 4 wedges

2 medium zucchini, peeled and diced into 1-inch pieces

2 medium yellow crookneck squash, peeled and diced into 1-inch pieces

4 large tomatoes, cored and chopped

2 tablespoons tomato paste (optional)

2 bell peppers, cored, seeded and cut into 1-inch pieces

A handful of fresh basil

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste.

1. Eggplant prep: follow this step only if you have the large globe eggplants which tend to be bitter. If cooking with the smaller Asian eggplants, proceed to the next step. Set up a colander over a larger bowl and place eggplant in colander. Pour out about a tablespoon of salt onto the eggplant and toss. Let eggplant drain for about 30 minutes.

2. In a large oven-proof pot, preferably one with a lid, pour in all but about 3 tablespoons of oil and turn heat to medium. Add garlic and onion and bring to a bubbling boil. Let cook for about 30 minutes while you prep the remaining ingredients. Don‘t walk away, because, you know, it‘s a pot of boiling oil.

3. Heat oven to 450 and get out a half-sheet pan or a large cast-iron skillet. Pour eggplant and squash and zucchini out onto the pan (you may need to do this in batches), pour remaining three tablespoons oil and some salt and pepper on the vegetables and set in oven to roast for about 30 minutes. You’re looking for a touch of caramelly brown on the edges of the veg, not blackened.

4. Ok, now we have a pot of boiling oil and alliums on the stove and a pan of roasting squash and aubergine in the oven. It’s time to turn your attention to the tomatoes. In a food processor, puree the tomatoes and peppers. Add to the onion and garlic oil and continue to cook for another 30 minutes. Optional: if using tomato paste, you can add it to the pot with the tomatoes and peppers.

5. When tomato/onion/garlic/oil mixture is a rich red color, add in roasted squash/zuke/eggplant. Taste mixture for seasoning, then add salt, pepper and basil.

6. Turn oven to 300 and set Dutch oven with stew inside. Let ratatouille cook for at least one hour, and several more if you can. Remove pot from oven and let cool.

I serve ratatouille at room temperature over a bowl of creamy grits. Other choices are pasta such as rigatoni, or couscous, or polenta.

Text and images copyright 2010, Lucy Mercer.

Low Country Love: Shrimp & Grits

Breakfast-style shrimp and grits by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

If there is a universal code of comfort food, surely shrimp and grits would be part of it. If I were writing the rules, I would say that comfort food: 1. must be warm, 2. served in a bowl, and 3. be filling to the belly and soothing to the soul. Like the best music and books, comfort food is imbued with a sense of place and a bowl of shrimp and grits, just like Proust's madeleine, pulls me back every time to the South Carolina low country.

I have a South Carolina provenance, spending eight of my growing-up years in the northern part of the state, but I didn’t see the painted houses of Charleston and dine on shrimp and grits until many years after I’d left the red clay for the green hills of Georgia. The upstate town where my family lived, Gaffney, is peach country, where we could buy the juiciest, most luscious peaches imaginable, but shrimp came from the A & P, just like everything else. Before I visited Charleston, I read Pat Conroy's books, in the same way that folks read books before they see movies, I had to read about the low country before I saw it for myself. Conroy is nationally know as the author of the “Prince of Tides“ and “The Great Santini” and dear to this Southerner's heart. He’s a raconteur, a lover of stories and food, and both are given equal treatment in his cookbook, "The Pat Conroy Cookbook." (If I ever meet Mr. Conroy again, I'm going to tell him that the title is factual, but doesn't do the content justice - this book is as much memoir as recipes.)

Conroy's books bring the South Carolina low country, particularly Beaufort, to life - he calls them "psalms" to his hometown. This is his description of the low country, "I cannot look at a salt marsh, veined with salt creeks swollen with the moonstruck tides, without believing in God. The marsh is feminine, voluptuous when the creeks fill up with the billion-footed swarm of shrimp and blue crabs and oysters in the great rush to creation in the spring."

The fishers of the billion-footed swarm are losing out to overseas competion, according to the South Carolina Shrimper's Association Marketing Board. Its website says that 75 percent of the shrimp market has been lost to cheaper pond-raised, imported shrimp. If supporting the American shrimp market is important to you, be sure to look for "American Ocean-Caught Shrimp" on the label.

Charlestonians have many ways with shrimp, (forgive me if this sounds Bubba Gump) pickled shrimp, shrimp paste, and my favorite, shrimp and grits. This is the fisherman’s breakfast, served on the boat or at home, with fresh-from-the-brine shrimp and the Southern standby, grits, which is dried, ground corn. (It’s similar to polenta and a satisfying food for breakfast or supper.) What started as inexpensive, readily available food has become an upscale icon of regional cuisine, and surely on every menu in restaurant-mad Charleston.

My recipe for shrimp and grits isn’t fancy, but does showcase the superlative sweetness of American ocean-caught shrimp. I saute the little guys in butter and finish with a hit of lemon juice. The grits are creamy and rich thanks to milk and chicken broth, butter and Parmesan cheese. My children love this, and it's cooked more often for supper than for breakfast.

Shrimp and Grits, Breakfast Style

Serves 4
Grits
1 cup chicken broth
1 cup water
2 cups milk
1 cup grits (see note below)
2 tablespoons butter
¼ cup Parmesan cheese, shredded
Salt and pepper to taste

Shrimp
1 stick butter
1 pound shrimp, peeled and deveined (save the peels for future shrimp broths)
Juice of one lemon (you won’t use it all)
Salt and pepper to taste


1. In a nonstick saucepan, pour in chicken broth, water and milk and heat over a medium flame until bubbles appear at perimeter. (Voice of experience: don’t leave the room, because boiled-over milk is a bear to clean.) Add grits in a slow, steady stream, stirring with a whisk all the while. Stone-ground grits take about 30 minutes of patient and frequent stirring, quick grits take between 5 and 10 minutes of steady whisking action. When grits are just shy of done (depends on your personal taste - loose or leaden), stir in Parmesan and butter and season to taste.

2. Pull out your favorite skillet and melt the butter over medium heat. When butter is foamy, add the shrimp and let cook until pink, just a couple of minutes. Stir to ensure even pinkiness. Freshen with lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste.

3. Serve bowls of creamy grits garnished with shrimp.

A note on grits: Chef cookbooks specify using stone-ground grits, organic preferred. These are not easy to come by for the home cook who shops at suburban supermarkets. And I find the idea of mail-ordering grits to be absurd. Every time I use stone ground grits, my kids pick out the brown specks and accuse me of putting bugs in their food. So, I use ordinary store brand grits in a canister. Look for brand names like Quaker and Jim Dandy and all will be fine. If you live in the South, look for the bag of Dixie Lily brand yellow corn grits. They cook in five minutes and have a perky yellow color that will make you smile.

© 2010, Lucy Mercer.

The quote about salt marshes and God is from "The Pat Conroy Cookbook," published by Random House, © 2004.