August 16: polenta cakes with shallot, leek, zucchini, and tomato (or, the Summer Eve)
By: Leah Romm
Tags: Cooking, Summer Dinner, Baking

(I didn’t make anything yesterday because I had a brunch that was so filling, I couldn’t even fathom eating another thing the rest of the day. Shout-out to Sam’s Log Cabin in Albany for serving a proper brunch!)

I had a somewhat busy day today, and when I finally got home, I frantically flipped through all of my cookbooks for inspiration. I wanted to bake something, but I am down to two eggs, and it was already 4:30 p.m., and nothing I was finding was both do-able in this time- and ingredient-crunch and piquing my interest.

I did, however, have a bunch of zucchini, a leek that was in desperate need of use, a bunch of tomatoes, and a Trader Joe’s (pre-cooked, which I didn’t realize until later) polenta…tube? I’m not sure what exactly to call it. I figured I could learn how to cook polenta, and then I would just top it with some nicely roasted or sautéed vegetables and call it dinner.

friendly reminder to read the packaging so you don’t waste time thinking you need to cook the polenta

This whole time I had assumed the tube was just interesting packaging, and that I would need to cook the polenta, so I was trying to figure out the best way to do that. It wasn’t until my partner and I started organizing the ingredients that I realized the polenta was pre-cooked.

I had seen some recipes involving grilling polenta, so I thought that might be a good idea, since we weren’t going to eat the polenta as a more creamy, spreadable base. Then, an idea came to my mind — I would channel my best inner fancy-restaurant-chef and create little gourmet stacks with the polenta patties as the bases.

When I removed the polenta tube from the package, it reminded me of one of those slimy-tube toys that kids play with that are super wiggly and the whole challenge is keeping them from jiggling out of your hand. It took me a slice or two to figure out how best to cut it. I put all of the patties on a plate and got to chopping the shallot, leek, and zucchini. (I had wanted to add some garlic and completely forgot! Life goes on!)

I heated up a cast iron pan on one burner and a griddled pan on another. In the cast iron, I sautéed the leek/shallot combination until it was nicely caramelized, adding in a few small pieces of an unknown chile towards the end. In the griddled pan, I let the thinly-sliced zucchini slices cook until they were nicely browned. I then cooked two polenta patties — only in each pan — to figure out how they cooked best. It seems overall like the griddled nonstick pan was a slightly better option, though the visual difference was fairly minimal. If nothing else, the griddled pan did less damage to the patties.

Once everything was ready to go, I assembled my silly take on a fancy-restaurant dish. I poured a dash of balsamic vinegar on a plate, onto which I placed a polenta patty. I topped the patty with a thin slice of fresh mozzarella. I topped the mozzarella with a layer of the leek/shallot/chile mixture, which I then topped with a thin, circular layer of the zucchinis. I then finished the little stack off with a spoonful of a diced-tomato-and-cilantro mixture my partner had made in the meantime. I decided to call it the Summer Eve, because a faux-fancy dish needs a faux-fancy name!