Month 4 day 17: Polenta with roasted tomatoes

First off, the pickles from the other day were awful. If you like sweet pickles, you will like that recipe. But if you were hoping for zesty dill, you will be sorely disappointed. I probably should've known better with the 1/3 c sugar, but I was just hoping maybe that was how much was required to offset the vinegar. Anyway, they were very sweet, and also the fennel flavor was pretty strong too. So sad.

Today I made:
Polenta with roasted tomatoes, Food Network May 2010

This recipe was straightforward and tasted pretty good. You're supposed to roast the tomatoes for a long time, but I cut it a little short because the fire alarm kept going off. I vaguely remember that something spilled over the last time I baked something, and I am paying for it now... the tomatoes are supposed to get a bit charred on the sides, but mine were just barely starting to blacken. The recipe specifically calls for canned San Marzano tomatoes. According to wikipedia, it's just a specific variety of tomato. It's much more expensive than normal canned tomatoes, and I'm not sure if I could taste the difference. I used kale instead of chard, and I reused the water for boiling the kale to make the polenta-- I figure it saves some energy and recycles some of the nutrients that probably leeched out too. This did mean that I had some random kale flotsam that ended up embedded in the polenta, but whatever. In the end I topped it with cotija cheese since I am just going to guess that they don't sell farmer's cheese at Shaw's.
I will save this recipe. It is simple but satisfying.