Polenta

WARNING: BEFORE YOU LOOK AT THE PICTURES!  READ DISCLAIMER!

Disclaimer: I have never seen polenta, let alone eaten polenta before.  Thank the Lord I am writing this and not speaking, because who knows if I am even pronouncing it correctly.  So, as a close friend of mine would say: DO NOT JUDGE ME!  Feel free to laugh though, I certainly did.  I am tempted to look up pictures of polenta, and see what it looks like....naaah!

Once again this recipe comes from Artisanal Gluten-Free Cooking by Kelli and Peter Bronski.  And I think where I first went wrong is mistaking my organic soy milk as UNSWEETENED organic soy milk.  So already the smell was sweet, and the recipe was calling for spices (yeah, just spices...it was up to me...uh oh!).  I wasn't sure what to do, so I decided to stick with the sweet theme, and threw in 3 table spoons of sugar and some cinnamon.  It smelled really nice, but started to remind me of french toast.  (Which, by the way, since French is supposed to be capitalized, should it be capitalized when using it to write "french fries" and "french toast" and what not?)  Then I had to layer it in a pan....I choose a pie dish.  Which ended up making it difficult to "fry" when I came to the last step of the recipe.  After all was said and done, I ended up giving it to the kids with syrup.  Now you know why I am laughing.  I am sure the inventor of polenta is rolling over in his/her grave right now.

Rating of recipe:

*Difficulty: 2 out of 5 stars

     The recipe said to add the cornmeal slowly so it wouldn't clump....well, I added it as slow as I could, and it still was lumpy!  UGH!  It was so frustrating.  You can see the lumps in the pictures even.  I even tried using a fork to smash the lumps, to no avail.  So I gave up, and let it be lumpy.

*Time: 4 out of 5 stars

     It is always hard for me to rate the time when I don't like the recipe.  Because any time spent on a recipe I don't like is time wasted.  But I try to make myself rate it better than that because maybe there is some one out there that would like the recipe, and then this rating would be different for them since they like it.  So I gave it 4, because I couldn't bare to give it 5.

*Price: 4 out of 5 stars

     Once again, hard to rate, because it was $1.24 for the whole thing, but when I think about what I am getting I am not too impressed.

*OHA: 5 out of 5 stars

     Everything I needed was in my house already!  Yay!

*Yum Factor: 2 out of 5 stars

     Gross!  Seriously!  Mushy and nasty.  Now, I am wondering if maybe I just made it wrong; like I said I have never tried it before.  And I shouldn't say gross....I did eat it, it wasn't  inedible.  It just wasn't that good.

*Calories: 3.5 out of 5 stars

     120 for 1/16 of a piece.  Not too bad.  But if it had tasted better, maybe I would have given it more stars. Taste really does affect every one of these categories.  Wow.

Over all recipe rating: 3.4 out of 5 stars