I got home from work and Tony was in the kitchen with me while I started putting dinner together and said “a lot of people had questions about the polenta fries!”  Didn’t know they would be such a hit!  And Errign was correct – the deep fat fryer was involved! 😀

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It takes a little planning!  Remember my shrimp and tomato basil suace on polenta the other night?  Well, it all started out with baking polenta.  When i saw the recipe at first, I thought that it called for too much water, but it worked out perfectly!

Baked Polenta

  • 8 cups water
  • 3 tablespoons olive oil (probably could have left this out)
  • 2 teaspoons salt
  • 2 cups polenta (I got it out of the bin the last time I was at Whole Foods)

Heat oven to 350.  Mix everything together in a 13 x 9 baking dish.  Bake for one hour, remove and let cool.  I then just cut it into squares, but my co-worker had a great idea to use cookie cutters to make cool shapes! 😀

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There is no pepper in this dish, but the top kind of came out like it had pepper on it!   Since it made so much I decided to cut them into fries and deep fry.  My first batch didn’t go so well.  I put them in the deep fryer, put the lid on, and walked away – two minutes later they were one giant pile!  So I put less in the second time around and fried each batch for about 2 minutes, and repeated until I was done.  I kept the deep fryer on and right before serving, I added them all to the basket in one layer, and gently submerged the basket so they would all be hot at the table.

Remember when we went to the soft opening at The Lucky Monk earlier this month – the place with the amazing burgers??!!  Well the following week the chef was on our local t.v. station, and the only seasoning they put on their burgers is salt and pepper!  The perfect ratio?  4:1 – 4 tablespoons of salt mixed with 1 tablespoon of pepper.  I now have a mixture next to my stove and have been using it on lots of things – including the fries as soon as they came out of the fryer.  The best part?  These were not greasy at all – the fryer keeps a constant temperature so the oil never cools and gets absorbed into the food. 😀

Off to take out my Chicken Alfredo and Spinach Lasagna out of the oven – its semi-homemade – I cheated and used jarred Alfredo sauce!  See you in the morning 😀