Polenta with sausage and vegetables
Polenta is one of the glories of Italian cuisine. Though most of us know it as a cornmeal mush, it dates back to ancient Rome, where it was known as Puls, and was a staple of ancient Roman cusine. It was made of many different types of grains, and even today Polenta can be made, not only of corn, but of buckwheat, among other starches. Polenta with Italian sausage is a classic pairing.
Another classic pairing is sausage and peppers. This was a special treat when I was growing up in an Italian neighborhood in New York. Every year, the local parish held a street festival in honor of St. Anthony of Padua. Among the many features, there would be a food stand where cooks would grill sausage and peppers and serve them up sizzling hot on a roll.
For this recipe, I decided to do a riff on both those staples. Though it’s easy as can be, it goes faster if you stock your refrigerator the same way I do. That means a jar of home-roasted, peeled red and yellow bell peppers, covered in a garlicky olive oil; a container of baked sliced eggplant; and sauteed button mushrooms. (If you use shitake mushrooms, you don’t need to sauté them.) If you don’t have those on hand, I’ll include my method for making them. You should do them the day before, as they take some time and need to relax a bit before they get eaten.
(I get asked, “Why not just add the peppers and eggplant and mushrooms raw when you cook everything else?” I’ve tried that, and it just doesn’t do it for me. Call me picky.)
Ingredients for 4 servings
2 lbs of your favorite Italian pork sausage, cut into bite size pieces
2 medium onions, sliced thin
2 cups red and yellow bell peppers, roasted, peeled and sliced into strips
4 oz sauteed button mushrooms, quartered, or raw sliced shitake or other mushrooms
5-6 slices of roasted eggplant, cut into bite-size pieces
2 medium zucchini, cut into half moons, about ½ inch thick
10 cherry tomatoes, halved
Fresh basil and oregano. Sometimes I use rosemary and thyme as well.
Method
1. Spread the onions and sausage into a baking dish about 2 inches deep. Drizzle with olive oil and bake, uncovered, at 350o for 20 minutes. Stir them all around and continue baking until the onions are soft and just starting to color, about 15 minutes.
2. Toss the remaining ingredients in a bowl with a drizzle of olive oil. Add to the baking dish, toss it all together, and continue baking until the tomatoes have collapsed and the zucchini is crunchy tender (20 minutes or so).
3. While the main course is baking, make your polenta. There are MANY ways to do this. To purists, you have to use something like 5 cups water to one cup cornmeal. First you boil the water with a teaspoon of salt, then lower it to a simmer, then add the polenta in a slow stream, whisking constantly, and keep whisking until the mush is thick, about 40 minutes. Then add a pat of butter, stir it in until it melts, and cover the pan for 5 minutes. This makes a very creamy polenta. There are faster recipes out there, so you do you. I used Bob’s Red Mill polenta, which is fairly coarse, and cooked it for about 10 minute in 3 cups of water.
4. When the polenta is done, spoon a couple serving spoon’s worth on a plate, and top with the sausage and vegetables. Serve with Parmesan or pecorino Romano cheese,
Roasted peppers (the way I do it):
1. Wash and dry 3-4 red and yellow bell peppers. (I’m one of those folks who finds green bells just taste unripe.) Rub them all over with olive oil, put on their sides in a baking dish, and bake at 350 until the skins color and blister, and the peppers collapse, about 2 hours. Cover them (or put them in a paper bag) and let them cool completely.
2. While they cool, put a smashed garlic clove into the bottom of a screw top jar and cover it with olive oil.
3. Pull out the pepper stems and seeds, pull off the skins (easy to do,) tear them into strips and drop them into the jar, adding a little oil with every few slices. If you really love garlic, you can add an extra clove or two. Make sure they end up completely covered with oil. Refrigerate. They’ll keep a couple weeks, but they’ll probably get eaten long before that.
Eggplant slices
1. While the peppers have had their start in the oven, wash and dry a whole eggplant. Slice it into rounds about ¼ inch thick. Lay them flat on a baking sheet or two, lined with parchment paper.
2. Brush both sides with olive oil and bake until soft and slightly browned, turning at 30 minutes and baking 20 minutes more. They MUST be very soft but not burned, so keep an eye on them after 30 minutes. (Undercooked eggplant is inedible.) Then, just stack them in a container and refrigerate.
Cooked Button Mushrooms
As long as I have the oven on, I just clean and quarter 8 oz of button mushrooms, toss them with oil in a baking dish, and bake them until all the water they exude is gone and they’re a nice color.
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