Parmesan Polenta (Unlocked)

and days filled with plants

Originally published for paying subscribers on March 26, 2023. Unlocked now!

I spend my mornings with succulents, the kinder of the house plants, and my afternoons with cacti, the proud and angry members of plant society.

If poked and prodded, succulents will bend and break, dropping new plants off their stalks. Cacti, on the other hand, poke back.

Much like with cooking, caring for plants is something passed down generationally in the Nicewarner family. My grandmother and my mother and my father all have a love for plants. I’ve been helping my family garden for longer than I can remember, although I can remember when I actually became helpful — once I got big enough to hold a shovel and focus enough to do more than jump in the leaf piles.

It can take a long time to learn how to care for plants. And each kind requires a different sort of care.

To care for cactus properly, you must become one with them — take inspiration and become grumpy and beautiful like them. Peaceful and stationary, bitter and biting.

I’ve worked with cactus and succulents at a greenhouse for the last five years. People are forever asking me how to care for them, so I thought I would put together a guide as short and succinct as a succulent cutting.

To Care for Succulents

Step One:

Ignore them. Walk your dog. Shop for your groceries. Cook your dinner and meet a friend for coffee.

Step Two:

After about two weeks, remember them. Check the soil by feeling it — if it feels dry like a desert, give it a good desert rain. This is achieved by placing the plant in your kitchen sink and running the faucet over it on low until you see water draining through the bottom of the pot and pooling up to the lip of the pot. Leave it in the sink to drain for a few minutes. Repeat.

Step Three:

When they grow too big for your liking, either replant them in a bigger pot or cut them back. If you’re like me, the knowledge that these cuttings can become happy new plants will weigh on you, and you won’t be able to just throw them away. If you have this kind of guilty conscience, try to cut your plants back in the late summer or early fall. Lay them out on a towel. Then, and I mean this part sincerely, leave them alone. Don’t touch them. Don’t water them. Don’t look at them; don’t breathe on them. Do this for about two weeks, and, in the meantime, collect some small pots. After two weeks, you’ll notice that the bottoms of the cuttings will have calloused and small, wispy roots may have started growing. Now you can pot them and then, when Christmas rolls around, give them to family, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances.

To Care for Cacti

Step One:

Set them in a sunny window.

Step Two:

Forget about them. They like their space, their privacy. Don’t get too close, or they, like a grumpy old man, will shake a stick at you and tell you to get off their lawn.

Step Three:

Water them the same way you water succulents, but do it less often (more like once per month than every two weeks).

The two kinds of plants — cacti and succulents — share similarities and meaningful differences. Both, like people, have some softer and kinder qualities alongside some stickier more troublesome ones. Succulents bend rather than break, but they’re classic over-sharers. Cacti stand their ground and put up strong boundaries, but their prickly nature turns away all but the most determined friends.

Plants, like people, need the right balance of independence and support. Too much of either, and they, like we, tend to falter. It’s a strong human impulse, I think, to care for things so much. With cacti and succulents, too much care spells death.

And that’s exactly how most people kill their succulents — by caring for them too deeply. Or by buying them from Home Depot.

Seriously, don’t buy succulents from Home Depot. That’s the real Step One: buy your succulents and cacti from local nurseries. The ones that end up in home improvement warehouses or, God forbid, Ikea, get shipped in dark trucks without temperature control for weeks on end only to end up sitting in a sunless place on a shelf until some poor unsuspecting plant-lover picks them up and takes them home, willing an already-not-breathing-thing to live in vain.

I’ll tell you an even darker secret if you lean in close — sometimes the plants are glued into the pots and are already dead.

Now that I’m done gossiping about plants, I hope you enjoy this plant-based recipe that I learned from another woman who works with me at the greenhouses. It’s delicious and springy and summery and I’m obsessed with it. I recently described it, when at a loss for all other words, as a Southwestern Ratatouille. And while that is a strange description, I think it holds true.

Parmesan Polenta

You will need:

For the main dish

3 zucchini

2 bell peppers

1 package cherry tomatoes, halved

1 red onion, thinly sliced

For the polenta base

1 1/2 cups course ground cornmeal

Pinch of salt

6 cups water

1 cup Parmesan, grated

6 Tablespoons butter

For the dressing

1/4 cup olive oil

Pinch of salt

4 garlic cloves, crushed

1 teaspoon red chili flakes

2 Tablespoons fresh rosemary, chopped

2 Tablespoons Balsamic vinegar

What to do:

First, preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Slice all of your vegetables thinly (not as razor-thin as for a Ratatouille, but think in that direction) and chop them in half. Lay out the peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, onion, and salt on a large rimmed baking sheet. Drizzle with olive oil. Roast them until they soften and start to turn brown, or for about 35 minutes.

In the meantime, boil the 6 cups of water seasoned with salt. Gradually sprinkle the polenta into the pan and stir constantly with a wire whisk. Turn the heat to a very low simmer, cover and continue to cook the polenta about 5 minutes until it’s thick, fluffy, and begins to pull away from the sides of the pan. Stir frequently to prevent it from sticking to the bottom of the pan. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the cheese and butter. Cover and set aside.

Then, make the dressing by combining the ingredients in a small bowl. When the vegetables are done cooking, stir the dressing into the vegetables before serving. Top with extra Parmesan cheese!

That’s all for this week! Thanks, as always for reading.

For those of you keeping score, you may have noticed that I have now twice promised and never delivered the next installment of my chocolate-making adventure. This is because my husband and I are under contract on our first home, and most of my kitchen tools are in storage, including my mortar and pestle. That’s your teaser for when I finally publish more about chocolate — what on earth could a mortar and pestle have to do with making chocolate if the beans are already roasted and winnowed? I apologize and promise that this summer’s “Food & Fodder” will be a veritable fondue fountain.

Speaking of being under contract on a home, while “Food & Fodder” will continue with the same number of posts per month, the schedule might be a little more sporadic from now through the end of May as we finish up this process. Thanks for your patience with this (very human) author! If you know anyone who would like this post (or Food & Fodder in general!) please share!

Thanks,

Juliana

PS —

Have you guys heard about Bookshop?

If you love supporting smaller, brick-and-mortar bookstores but love shopping from the comfort of your home (or, like me, you live in a teeny tiny town with a lovely but sometimes limited book selection) you’ve got to check them out. 10% of their sales go to local book stores, and 10% goes to their affiliates (like me!) every time you buy a book. They’ve got all the selection of a big online bookstore, and they’ve donated $20 million and counting to bookstores!

I now have a little “storefront” on their site, so if you’re wanting to see or buy some of my favorite books, head on over to my Bookshop site! Right now, my Bookshop lists include my Cookbook Collection, My Work, My Top 10 (always changing), and My New Foray into Scary Books.

You can find a favorite cookbook of mine, “Half-Baked Harvest: Super Simple,” there!

If you’re looking for newsletter recommendations catered to your interests, I highly recommend The Sample. They send you a curated sample of newsletters once a day that you can subscribe to in one click! Plus, clicking on this link can help more people find “Food & Fodder!”