Polenta Cutlets with Olives

Hello fellow chefs! This is my first post on your totally awesome website. I'm living on the Big Island of Hawaii, surviving by limited means, so I told Steph I'd be able to do a recipe once a month...so here it is!

I told my good friend, Jen, about this blog, and we decided to make a fun girly time out of it by cooking and blogging as a team. She's currently taking a 3-month School of Photography and gets to try out her camera skills, while I learn the skill and art of cooking. The recipe we chose to make was Polenta Cutlets with Olives.

Neither of us had ever made polenta before, but I'd seen Rachael Ray do it on her show, so I was confident we could do it. The most important thing about making polenta is making sure the heat, stirring, and level of water/vegetable broth are all right...in the end, I think it cooked too fast, because the texture was a little more gummy than what it was supposed to be.

Never the less, all the ingredients went together so well. We sauteed the chopped onions and garlic, then added the sun-dried tomatoes and olives...the sun dried tomatoes weren't supposed to be oil-packed, but that's all the store had....I think this was vital because our cutlets ended up being very oily in the end. Once all the ingredients were sauteed, we mixed it with the cornmeal and then poured the whole mixture into the boiling veggie broth. Once it thickened, we popped it in the oven for 15 minutes and spread some parmesan on top when we took it out. After cutting it into diamond shapes, we also had a garnish of marinara sauce and more olives.

I really liked the taste and texture....Jen's husband, Nick, was not so keen on the texture, but said the taste was great. I think to do it differently, I would have used a smaller pot for the boiling broth, added the cornmeal at a lower temperature, and gotten sun-dried tomatoes with no oil. But the thing is, neither of us had had polenta cutlets before, so we had nothing to compare it to....lesson #1 of cooking (for me at least) will have to be this: Don't cook anything you've never tried before:)

Jill and Jen