Someone's In The Kitchen...

and it ain't Dinah. Tis I, me, myself.

I love fiddling in the kitchen on Sunday afternoon, and I love it best of all in the fall and winter when I can use my oven without jacking up my air conditioning expenses. Last week I bought these cute multi-colored root vegetables: carrots and potatoes in several different hues, including blue (potatoes) and white (carrots). And yes, I do buy my crayons in the 64 color boxes.

I roasted the potatoes and carrots with some garlic cloves and cut up red onions (which are really, as you know, purple). I then cannily tossed them with several dribbles of the oil of the virgin organic olives, a grinding of four kinds of fresh peppercorns, a toss or two of sea salt and several sprigs of thyme plucked fresh from my garden.

I bet you're wondering what that yellowish cowpie is at the top of the pan. That, my dear friends, is fresh polenta that I made. For that, I had to first sift through a half cup of polenta, taking it out into the broad sunlight to try and ascertain what exactly those dark specks in it were. I was looking, of course, for movement, legs, feelers. I saw none, so I decided that either the black specks were a natural part of the polenta--or they were dead bugs. If the latter, I reassured myself (in the best Alton Brown mode) that they were merely protein to go with my veggies. For some reason, the meal was singing a siren song of lemon to me, so I used the juice of a lemon as part of the polenta's liquid. When the whole mess was nice and thick, I threw it into the pan with the veggies, which is as you see it here.

And here you see it as I've plated it. I recently learned the verb "to plate", but obviously I haven't learned to do it.

Never mind--the whole thing was exquisitely delicious. As it was again tonight. And will be again tomorrow night.