Polenta Love

Tonight, I've discovered a wonderful new food to cook with and eat... Polenta. It's a corn bread-like grain that tastes very similar to grits. I recently picked up a tube of polenta at Trader Joe's (another obsession of mine), and created a recipe with it all on my own. I called it polenta pesto bites with eggplant. Here's what I did:

Step 1: slice eggplant into quarter inch circles and coat with either egg white or Pam olive oil spray. Drop into bag of Italian bread crumbs and shake up bag to coat eggplant. Bake at 400 degrees for 20 minutes.

Step 2: slice polenta into half inch circles and lay on top of eggplant. Bake for 20 more minutes.

Step 3: top with Pesto sauce (or marina) and Italian cheese or fresh mozzarella. Place back in oven for 5 minutes or until cheese is melted.

And there you have it. It's a great appetizer option or even a meal since it's pretty heavy with the pesto coated in top. I googled eggplant and polenta and came across recipes that were exactly like mine, which burst my bubble on how amazingly creative I was, but oh well. The photo on the left is a more creative version of what I did, but you get the idea.

I can't wait to cook with polenta again! You can even microwave it, so I may bring it to work with some pizza sauce and cheese and make polenta pizza bites. Yum. The other fabulous thing about polenta is that it's healthy! A fifth of the tube (pictured) is 70 calories and ZERO grams of fat. Plus, it has a little bit of fiber and protein, too. I sliced about 8 circles of polenta and only used half the tube. I am truly psyched about cooking with polenta more often. And yes, I know I'm a complete nerd too.