This is a recipe I mostly copied from my mother-in-law, and the pics are from the very first time I tried making it. It’s a plate for cold weather, it’s simple and tasty, and easy to prepare in a completely vegan/vegetarian fashion if you want. Here it goes: Ingredients:
Ingredients
Polenta: 80g per person. This is a generous amount, but change according to how hungry people are. Polenta is rarely left-over.
Onions: I used Borettane onions, but I guess any small and sweet onions will do. Here’s a pic of what I used. I don’t have a weight: I put some 6 small onions in the pot.
Pork: you can add a small quantity of pork Italian sausage and/or meat to the pot, it just goes great with polenta. Or not, and you get a great vegetarian recipe (vegan too, I guess).
Tomato sauce. I used the Mutti sauce because it tastes great. I used probably 400ml of it, but again, I didn’t measure it because that’s how I roll.
Olive oil, salt: as needed.
Preparation
Put a bit of oil in a pot, then add the pork (if any) and start cooking it. After a minute or so, add the tomato sauce, some salt and a pinch of sugar (it reduces the tomato sourness). Add water to the mix to thin down the tomato and to have enough liquid to cook the onions. This step will take some 40-45 minutes: you will know that the onions are ready when poking them with a wooden spoon will cause them to break. Furthermore, do break some of the onions: they will mix with the sauce and the flavor of the whole dish will be better. Keep a couple of small onions whole if you want: the inside will be sweet and super-moist.
Onions in the pot
Keep stirring the mix once in a while, and keep adding water if the sauce gets too thick: you will want a relatively runny sauce for your polenta (note that in my picture the sauce is a bit too thick: I went back and added some more water to the rest of it in the pot, putting it back on the flame for a couple of minutes). Plan ahead your timing: you want the polenta to be ready when the onions are. Personally, I used the “instant” Polenta Valsugana because I am a heathen barbarian from the land of the Southern Sealands (aka: Liguria), and the people of the Po plains would probably burn me at the stake for this… but what the hell, it takes too much time to make regular polenta.
But hey, if you can get your hands on traditionally mill-ground integral corn flour and have the time and wherewithal… go ahead: your polenta will be heavenly. When both the polenta and the onions are ready, pour your yellow ambrosia in the plates and the onions and sauce on top of it, and enjoy!
