 |
| Polenta with Crispy Serrano Ham and Melted Raclette |
The idea came in response to the frustration of cooking for my kids. Don't get me wrong: I love, love, to cook for, and especially with, my children; I find great joy in bringing children into the kitchen and watching them learn to cook, and I believe strongly that it is every parent's responsibility to help their littles learn what real food tastes like, what tastes good to them, what doesn't, and why. Nevertheless, when the homework hasn't been finished, the bath is getting cold, and our routine is less off-track than it is careening-off-the-rails into some life-imitating-art version of Wiley Coyote piloting a locomotive into a swan dive off the rim of the Grand Canyon, I will readily confess that I find preparing three separate versions of a dish, just to accommodate this week's litany of idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, exceedingly trying.
I recently found myself staring down the barrel of yet another Monday night meal (Mondays are always the hardest, for me, maybe it's the hangover from cooking fun stuff straight from the market all weekend; or perhaps the kids are grumpy with the first homework assignments of the week; and of course, there are lunches to be made; the TV is crap; all in all, I suppose it's mainly that the whole family has lived in some semblance of Party Mode since we all got let out on Friday) and figured, why not put the question back to them? I did a quick inventory of the cupboards and laid out the simplest (for me) and most likely to succeed (for them) options: The ubiquitous pasta-with-butter; some leftover mac-n-cheese; a breakfast burrito; polenta; or, barring one of the above, go get yourself a bowl and a spoon and have some cold cereal, because I'm done. The polenta took it by several lengths, leaving me with the sort of problem I like best: How should I transform a simple ingredient into a main-course dish with a minimum of fuss?
