Sunday, March 28, 2010

Coconut Curry Polenta and Chop Salad

A couple of days ago I had an amazing meal at a bar during happy hour. My mind was blown when I ate the coconut curry polenta with sesame sauteed veggies and sweet chili sauce. I've never had a more tasty polenta!

As I tend to do, I then tried to make my own version of this dish. Since I didn't have a recipe for the curried polenta I made one up, substituting half the cooking water with coconut milk and various other spices (Thai hot sauce, tamari soy sauce, curry powder, grated ginger).

I cooked the polenta until it was a thick and hard to stir, then spread it in a pyrex dish to cool. As it cools, the polenta hardens and can be handled easily and prepared for any recipe. However, this batch is probably limited by its dominant curry flavor.


Earlier, at the store, I mysteriously wandered over to the cabbage and got a head of red cabbage. It inspired me to create a chop salad with collard greens and orange bell pepper. For the salad I made a dressing of olive oil, lemon juice, cumin, curry powder, and turmeric. I was attempting to have the salad have similar flavors to the polenta.
Overall, I am very happy with this meal. Upstairs, my friend Casey roasted some asparagus to go along with it (and her plates are a fun color, so the meal looks very pretty too).

My only critique is that the polenta could have had a more rich flavor; it got a little lost next to the salad dressing. In the future I think I'll sauté some veggies to put with the polenta instead of the salad.

3 comments:

JLF said...

looks good! but i don't see a recipe?

Randi said...

So, I cooked this polenta in the standard cooking method (found from the reverse side of the package). Replacing about 1 cup of water with a cup of coconut milk gave it the distinct coconut flavor, but you can add more if you want. Then I added a couple teaspoons of chili sauce and other spices, to taste.

Anonymous said...

How funny! We were just at the Blue Monk in Portland, OR and had this exact same meal and I too wanted to recreate it. Is this where you ate it?