Thursday, August 03, 2006
Birthday Celebrations
I have the cutest grandma ever, and I’ll beat anyone who says otherwise with the family polenta stick. I went north a couple weeks ago to spend my birthday with her, and much like many of the past thirty-seven years, we celebrated with a polenta dinner that took most of the day to prepare. We started our morning with a trip to the Ferndale Meat Company, where Grandma haggled with the butcher over the fat content of the stew meat, and although I could barely see a spec of white on the luscious red chunks, she still seemed uncertain after we paid that it would in fact be tender enough. After that, it was off to the grocery store to carefully inspect and select the remaining sauce ingredients. On the way home we stopped and picked up my niece, Shayln, to help with the prep work and then got to chopping.
The sauce simmered for a couple hours before we boiled the water for the polenta. Admittedly, I can be kind of lazy and usually choose instant polenta over the real thing, but Grandma is a purist. I am convinced she inherited special polenta-stirring muscles because her nearly ninety-year-old arms always seem to hold up much longer than mine (and I’m the kind of girl who likes doing push-ups). We used a wooden spoon to stir since the polenta stick--a broom handle cut short by my great grandfather and worn from decades of strain against the thick cornmeal mush--has become something of a family relic. We took turns, and although Shayln and I were ready to give up after about ten minutes, Grandma’s experience told her to press on. She claims her dad was so skilled with the stick that he could cook the polenta until it just folded away from the sides of the pot. Grandma has never been able to replicate this herself, but if you’ve ever tried cooking polenta, you probably already know that it sounds like a nearly impossible feat--and yet we continue to dream. Someday maybe the magic will happen for us, too.
We finally sat down to eat around 6 PM, and within a half hour the meal was over, but worth every second we spent preparing it. All of Grandma’s worry about the meat was for nothing. It was so tender it just fell apart in my mouth (almost no chewing required!). When I asked Shayln what she wanted for breakfast the next morning, she said, “Some of that sauce. Duh!”
Although this was the finest birthday dinner I had this year, I had several other yummy meals with family and friends: barbecue at T-Rex in Berkeley with Evany and Marco, Chinese with my mom and grandma in Fortuna, So-Hum cuisine in Redway with Mel, sushi in Berkeley with Pat, and Town Hall in San Francisco with Frew and Luke. Thanks, everybody!
