A Successful and Timely Pood Experiment

Y’all know we had a garden this past summer ... but in my focus on the tomatoes and their prodigious output, I overlooked commenting on a few other crops. Today, with a lot of economic bad news and worrying, and with Bush’s so-called stimulus plan seen through and the U.S. dollar still getting fucked by Paulson et al., our little corn experiment is worth reporting.

Some back story first ... I had wanted to grow some sweet corn, but MAL isn’t a big fan and the snolfs wouldn’t be here to enjoy it; so I chose other crops. However, Snolf the First wasn’t to be deterred, and when he found some seed corn [painted red, so that it’s distinguishable from corn that’s safe to eat—as I understand it, seed corn is treated with insecticides, etc. and is thus considered poisonous], he took it upon himself to plant it in the garden. Most of it came up, and most of that bore fruit. I sampled one ear when I considered it to be ripe enough to compare to sweet corn ... it was tough and flavorless. Definitely not worth eating. But I left the remainder to dry, for him to harvest when he came back last fall ...

Not only did he harvest it himself, he and MAL put some of it through our hand-operated grinder to see what it’d be like as polenta. Our grinder isn’t the best one on the market; it ground unevenly (MAL says a second pass with some of the larger bits would’ve rectified that, but no one wanted to invest the time) and, it seemed to me, rather slowly. But we got something that I decided to try to make polenta with.

Using a basic polenta recipe, I cooked it to the soft, porridgey stage so that we could evaluate its taste and texture without distractions or interference from other ingredients. Not surprisingly, the larger bits remained a little firm—not necessarily unpleasantly so, especially if one likes polenta with a bit of texture to it—but the bulk of it was acceptably creamy. What did surprise me was that the flavor, while not stellar, was better than the fresh, ripe corn ear I’d sampled during the summer.

Would I choose this less-expensive ersatz polenta over the real stuff? No; I adore good polenta and our feed corn substitute was clearly inferior. But if it came down to eating something like this versus going hungry, you can bet I’ll use it to keep my family fed. Nice to know, too, that it’d work before the shit really hits the fan.