My mom and I spent the last week in a delightful, riverside cabin in the mountains of central Oregon. For our meals we brought with us just a few ingredients: polenta, chicken, fresh mozzarella (my saving grace in this new cheese-deprived life), sweet Italian sausage (fresh and nitrite free, so no risk of triggering a headache), greens, asparagus, eggs, onions, mushrooms and thyme. Okay, maybe that sounds like a lot, but I have a tendency to cook entirely different meals each day, so this was an interesting exercise.
Our first meal was polenta, garlicky sauteed greens and baked chicken breast topped with onions and mushrooms sauteed with fresh thyme (if onion is a migraine trigger for you, substitute shallots). This is such an easy meal and, as you will see, it provides a plethora of leftover options. If polenta isn’t a regular part of your culinary repertoire, I recommend that you consider making it so. I love polenta because it’s delicious, the leftovers can be prepared in an entirely different ways than the original and it’s simple to cook (the idea that you have to arduously and continuously stir it is a myth; I actually recommend staying far away from it as it cooks because it vigorously ejects fiery hot polenta bombs as it bubbles away – I have the scar to prove it).
For breakfast later in the week, we fried up the polenta in butter and olive oil, and served it with asparagus, Italian sausage and a fried egg (obviously frying eggs is not my forte):
And a lunch one sunny afternoon: greens, fried polenta croutons, leftover chicken from our first night, fresh mozzarella and asparagus.
In a way it was liberating to cook with the same set of ingredients for several days. I can be a little tyrannical about variety, so I’ve been making an effort to actually develop a repertoire of go-to meals. Without that, as much as I love eating good food, cooking can become overly demanding.
