Saturday, June 5, 2010

chickpea polenta, white fish with sauce vierge, poached egg

chickpea polenta,white fish,vierge sauce,poaced egg

New American Breakfast, nineteenth in a series, where unnecessary starches especially grain is foresworn and everything else is accepted.

Well, it's 5:00 PM and just about time for breakfast.

Yesterday was a late lunch and an even later dinner and more cocktails than I usually have in a month. Three.

I'm glad that my friend called me for dinner because it gave me a chance to deliver the card I made which cancelled the need to post it, and that erased the need to get up early to make it to the PO before things get busy. This is the first time I was present, no wait, the second time, I was present to gauge the reaction of the recipient which I can say was, eh.

Pois chiches polenta, poisson blanc avec sauce vierge, oeuf poché. Now that's how one would up jazz up what amounts to leftover fish.

Garbanzo beans, chickpeas, the dried kind that come in a bag or from the bulk bins. Also sold in cans all over the place. They're unavoidable. Used the world over, by friends and enemies alike. A powerhouse of a legume there. Apparently. We used to have a housekeeper who put them in everything. This turned my impressionable formative mind against them because to my thinking they had no business in my salad. But I have since matured and changed that childish opinion.

I would have liked to mill them into flour but they're too large for the slots of the Nutrimill. I thought of smashing them with a hammer and putting the broken bits into the feeder. Instead, I replaced the new coffee grinder that wore out from undisciplined abusive overuse with another new coffee grinder. They're so cheap on Amazon, we could go on like this forever. Now the New new grinder turned those hard garbanzos into dust in no time flat. No need at all to drag out the mill. This powder was intended for crackers, but there it sat, urging me, daring me, challenging me to use it like cornmeal or grits. Polenta. Behold: I have invented chickpea polenta, and for this I will be awarded the highest honors, and acknowledged as the guy who completely challenged culinary convention. Unless, of course, somebody else beat me to all that. In that case, never mind.

* 3/4 cup water
* 3/4 cup chicken broth
* [into that, the herbs that I have that seemed good to use. Fresh tarragon, bay, and sage leaves. They were added to the liquid, boiled for awhile, when they filled the kitchen with their scent, they were removed and discarded. It would have made a fine if thin soup right there. ]
* 3/4 cup chickpea flour
* 2 tablespoons olive oil
* 1 tablespoon tahini
* 1 tablespoon honey
* 1 smashed/diced garlic clove
* 1/50th teaspoon s/p/c house mix, where c=cayenne. Possibly 1/20th, it's hard to tell.

Boil the liquid. Add everything. Stand back because it quickly becomes volcanic. Hardly no cooking required at all, actually.

It totally works. This was fun to watch come together. It's easy to imagine it flavored otherwise.

Smeared in a thin layer all over a plate.

* fish and vierge sauce held over from yesterday's lunch
* egg poached in acidified salted water, the extra giggly albumen trimmed around the edges of a slotted spoon.

But I'm not positive about this qualifying for the NAB series. Chickpeas are not grains but they are seeds and grains are seeds too. Here's how I see it.

seeds VENN


So no, chickpeas are not grain. Or are they? You know these botanical classifications are entirely arbitrary anyway -- divisions made in accordance to somebody else's thinking, and that change as the thinking changes, with no concern at all to my own thoughts and efforts about developing grain-less New American Breakfasts, so ordered to help counter the problem of overweightedness which is broadly acknowledged as a national pandemic. Pandemic. How's that for hyperbole? Obesity is not even an actual illness. Still, anyone whose been to a public pool, or a VFW picnic, or a bingo parlor, or a fourth of July BBQ, or even a gay bathhouse where one could see more fat flabby gelatinous asses than on BBW bathing suit runway and where one could reasonably expect at the very least a modicum of vanity, let's just say anywhere and everywhere, could confirm that it's a problem that needs addressing.

Okay, so I might have exaggerated there a little bit again. The point I'm getting at is maybe we should leave off the chickpeas, I don't know. I think they're actually healthy.

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