copyright 2010 by The Bettina Network, inc.
Most of my young life, growing up in New Orleans, grits was a daily breakfast staple. If my grandmother didn’t make grits for me for breakfast – no matter what else she made – I would ‘pout’ until she produced grits. My favorite breakfast in those days was grits and liver. My neighbor used to tease me because he could hear me through the window in the morning calling downstairs for my ‘drits and liba, Mama’ when I was just learning to talk.
It is amazing how things change as we grow-up. Today I can’t stand to eat liver. When I think of my grandmother’s lovingly prepared calf’s liver I remember the conversations about who had the best calf’s liver, how old the calf should be -not too old or the liver would be tough with that strange taste, how long to let it cook (You didn’t want well done liver) etc. I could not hold that conversation today without getting a little sick to my stomach. I often wonder if my turning away from liver was a function of growing up or of the society changing around me having an affect on my eating likes and dislikes.
Grits, however, has remained a favorite and not just any kind of grits – Creole grits. I look down my nose at anyone who prepares grits according to the recipe on the box and tries to serve it to people for them to actually eat. It seems such a sacrilege to a great food.
The amounts below will feed about four or five people, with some left over for later to fry in butter or reheat. You need to get to know, for yourself, the amounts you want to use for the number of people you are feeding. Cooking is not slavishly following someone else’s discoveries, but taking the general idea someone else follows, making it your own. The pre=prepared pre-processed food companies have spent billions on marketing to make cooking seem like some mysterious process, which is known and can be successfully practiced only by the professionals in the food processing company’s commercial kitchens – ergo you have to buy their prepared foods. Because you couldn’t possibly make your own – cost too much, takes too much time, you don’t know how to make these complicated dishes. Many of us have bought that story-line. I am still amazed at the number of people I meet who think baking bread from scratch is a really difficult and time consuming process – it is definitely not. With a little planning, baking bread fits into the busiest lives. In reality, cooking is easy and much of it quick. Spending hours slaving over a hot stove to make a meal is an advertising guru’s creation, not a reality.
Back to Creole Grits:
1 cup organic yellow stone ground grits
(I prefer Arrowhead Mills grits. We try to stick to Arrowhead Mills products with flour and other grains, because we discovered the only place in the U. S. which does not have DDT residue in the ground is in the area around Arkansas where Arrowhead Mills products are grown. Robert says it is because the farmers were too poor to afford the pesticides which were so popular in the 1950’s and ’60s and which were going to save the world from starvation. Well, we know that didn’t happen – instead they’ve caused the world much grief. So today, those farmers and their descendants are rewarded by being able to charge a premium for their organic products because they are the only place one can get truly organically grown grains.)
4 cups water
1 organic onion – vary the kind you use when you make this dish
3 stalks organic celery
1 large organic green pepper
1 teaspoon himalayan salt – or sea salt if you haven’t changed over yet
cayenne pepper to taste
3 kinds of your favorite cheeses – we use parmesan reggiano, jack cheese and cheddar. We use Stonyfield Farms’ organic raw milk cheeses as much as possible because they are made with raw un-homogenized, un-pasteurized milk and they do not use rennet or other synthetic things to rush the cheese-making process and cut corners.
Put water in a glass corning pot and set the pot on the stove over a medium to low flame. Use a steel wire whisk to start the water swirling around and while you swirl the water slowly add the grits. You do this to keep the grits from clumping.
Let this mixture cook a few minutes, stirring it and keeping a close eye on the pot because you don’t want it to either burn or clump so stirring is essential. While keeping an eye on the pot and stirring the grits, chop the vegetables or put them in a food processor to chop pretty fine – unless you like to see the vegetables in this dish. In that case, chop the vegetables to whichever size makes you happiest.
Because we make this for bed and breakfast guests, we process the vegetables almost to a sauce. Not everyone enjoys the different textures produced when you chop the vegies. You will notice we do not fry the vegies in butter or oil before putting them into this dish. That is an unnecessary evil and produces a very different taste, which I don’t like.
Add the vegetables to the grits and continue stirring. I think putting the vegetables into the grits without pre-cooking them gives added nutrition to this dish and eliminates the oil that would come from adding the vegies after frying them in oil or butter.
When the grits look almost, but not quite done, add about 2/3 the cheese (two cups of cheese is great, but that is my taste, you might want to add more or less depending upon your taste buds.) We grate the cheese before adding to this dish. The only difference chopping the cheese into pieces instead of grating makes – it takes longer for the cheese to melt and takes you a longer time stirring the dish to incorporate the cheese. So you either spend your time grating, or you spend it stirring.
Stir the pot until the cheese is well mixed into the grits.
If this is the pot in which you want to serve the grits, sprinkle the remaining cheese on top of this dish (which would be about 1/3 the amount you started with), put a cover on the pot and put the pot in a 350 degree oven for about 1/2 hour. If you do not want to bring this pot to the table, transfer the grits to your serving pot – which should be oven-proof – sprinkle the cheese on top, cover this pot and let the grits cook for the requisite 1/2 hour. The amount of time you let the grits cook depends upon how long it takes for the cheese on the top to melt and form a nice added taste and another texture. The top will look like melted cheese with a light brown color with oil, which has come out of the cheese, on top.
This is great for breakfast, lunch or dinner. It is especially good served with broiled wild-caught (not farm raised) fish – halibut, cod, etc. If you don’t obsess over fried foods you might also serve this with cat-fish, covered with corn meal and fried in butter.
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