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.

Brought to You in Technicolor

(Above) Ratatouille raw: heirloom tomatoes, sweet peppers, Japanese eggplants, handfuls of basil, onions, groovy duotone Zephyr squash.

Four hours and more than a few dirty pots later, this technicolor display of vegetables became ratatouille, the foundation of a somewhat French meal for my Francophile friend who insisted that couscous is the proper accompaniment to a pot of this vegetable stew.

Menu a la Francaise

(forgive the pidgin French. If you were in my high school
French class, you would understand.)

Salade Au Vinaigrette

Ratatouille avec Couscous

Baguette avec Garlic Butter

Thin Crust Apple Tart

Vanilla Coffee with Vanilla Sugar

(Above) Plus more from the week's CSA box. Tomatoes, squash, peppers, okra and apples.

I completely forgot to take a picture of the Sun Gold cherry tomatoes. They are charming and yummy. Little Miss gobbled them up with Ranch dressing. She likes to put a tomato in each cheek and pretend she is a squirrel.

She's Back in the Kitchen & Taking Names

After a brief hiatus spent job-hunting and adjusting to having two young children in school, not to mention aimless hours searching for gas stations with fuel to sell, I've returned to the kitchen, my source for solace in the approaching autumn. The light through the window has changed, it's amber coming through at a different angle, backlighting the spider web on the porch. 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.

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 favorite is derived from the Gourmet Cookbook. Here is the recipe, with my variations noted in parentheses.

Ratatouille

4 large tomatoes, peeled and chopped
8 large garlic cloves, thinly sliced
1 cup copped fresh flat-leaf parsley (I left this out, due to my garden's parsley crop failure)
1 cup plus 2 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil (I don't think I used this much. I just added a bit as I went along)
1 (2 lb.) eggplant, cut into 1-inch cubes (I use 3 or 4 Japanese eggplants, peeled, halved lengthwise and sliced into 1-inch cubes)
2 1/4 tsp. salt (I didn't measure salt, but tasted as I went along)
2 large onions, (halved and then cut into 4 wedges per half)
3 assorted bell peppers, cored, seeded and cut into 1-inch wide pieces
4 medium zucchini, quartered lengthwise and cut crosswise into 3/4 inch think pieces (I used yellow summer sqash instead and peeled it first, just because I always do)
1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

Combine tomatoes, garlic, parsley, basil and 1/3 cup oil in a 5-quart heavy pot, bring to a simmer and cook, covered, stirring occasionally, until tomatoes break down and sauce is slightly thickened, about 30 minutes.

(The instructions then describe salting eggplant, which I did not do because I used the Japanese eggplants. They are petite and do not require salting to remove the bitter liquid.)

Meanwhile, heat 3 tablespoons oil in a 12-inch skillet over moderate heat. Add onions with 1/4 tsp. salt and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened, 10 to 12 minutes. With a slotted spoon, transfer onions to a large bowl. Add 3 more tablespoons oil to skillet and cook bell peppers, with 1/4 tsp. salt, stirring occasionally, until softened, about 10 minutes. With slotted spoon, transfer peppers to bowl with onions. Add 3 more tabespoons oil to skillet and cook squash with 1/4 tsp. salt, stirring occasionally until softened, 8 to 10 minutes. With slotted spoon, transfer squash to bowl with other vegetables.

While squash is cooking, add remaining oil to skillet and cook eggplant over moderate heat, stirring occasionally, until softened, 10 to 12 minutes.

Add vegetables, remaining 1 tsp. salt, and pepper to tomato sauce and simmer, covered, stirring occasionally, until vegetables are very tender, about 1 hour. Season ratatouille with salt (and a few generous grinds of black pepper). Cool, uncovered, and serve warm at room temperature.

A container of ratatouille in the fridge is as good as having a jar of peanut butter in the pantry. This versatile stew can be eaten warm or at room temperature. It's also excellent with garlicky sausage bits stirred in or perhaps some flaky white fish, which reminds me of my uncle's seafood stew served when I was (quite a bit) younger.