I CANNOT TELL A LIE- Days 13 and 14

I succumbed to temptation on my trip and made a grocery purchase to bring home - but I ask you, have you ever seen LEFSA in south Florida? Easiest way to describe LEFSA is it looks like an ultra-thin sheet of Lahvash that tastes like a super-soft thick potato chip. According to what I was told by the counter lady at Jacob's in Okasis, Minnesota, a quick sidetrip off Interstate 35 which runs between Minneapolis and Fargo, LEFSA can be used like any sandwich wrap. We'll see what use I can make of it....

But I won't be using it for breakfast because I'm too tired to be creative after a 1AM arrival home from the great white North (well, we DID have snow mixed with rain in Fargo). Eggs are my go-to this morning, mixed with a small scoop of Boursin and scrambled to my version of perfection...soft and slightly runny with threads of the flavorful soft cheese winding through the soft yellow mound.

Truly, I can come up with nothing quick to grab for lunch - and there's no easy leftovers to convert since I've been gone, so I decide today will be my out to lunch day. And dinner is over at a friend's tonight, so I'm skating easy on this Monday back to work.

Tuesday morning, Day 14, and I head for oatmeal. Because I want to take it a step beyond the typical breakfast fare, I decide to stir in a hearty spoonful of cherry preserves which proves to be a great choice. Sweet, tart, cherries swirled through the oatmeal ... yum!

I know I must bring lunch. I grab a container with no label from the freezer, peel back the top and take a look. I'm thinking it's some kind of vegetable soup maybe? Sniffing the contents doesn't help much, but now I'm leaning in the direction of a meat-based stew. What the hey - it's going to be today's mid-day repast whatever it is. Happily, it turns out to be beef stew and its time in the freezer made it none the worse for the wear.

Driving home I'm overcome with the desire for polenta. Rich, creamy polenta, redolent with parmesan cheese (which I know I have several chunks of in the cheese drawer). But do I have the corn meal? I try to envision my pantry and all I can see is that bag of yellow self-rising cornmeal which I know won't work. Before my ETR days I would have made a stop at the store to purchase the correct cornmeal product, and probably added several other items to my cart. But not today. Today, I must forego the stop and learn to live with the possibility that I may not be able to fulfill my polenta desire.

As I walk into the house I'm already thinking, perhaps a skillet of cornbread will do the trick and can be my fallback. And then....eureka! A container of stone-ground yellow corn meal....perfect! Only not so fast. Should I want polenta again some time in the next couple of weeks I'll be completely out of luck. But I also have some white corn meal and, according to one of my Italian cookbooks (I don't think I've mentioned that I have a collection of a hundred plus cookbooks), in the Veneto region of Italy white cornmeal is used for polenta. So, I compromise the northern and southern Italian versions and use half yellow, half white, leaving myself enough for another time around. Since I have a splash of milk that's still OK, I cook the polenta in a combination of milk and water, along with some fresh, well not so fresh anymore, they've kind of dried on the branch, thyme leaves. Adding a chunk of butter and a good handful of threads of freshly grated parmigiano reggiano results in the creamy, flavorful dish I was seeking.

I decide to top the polenta with some pasta sauce I've saved, and saute some frozen Italian sausage I've found to present myself with a full-blown Italian treat. And it is. A tasty Italian treat.

The leftover polenta I level smoothly into a container and that, along with the remaining sausage find happy homes on a refrigerator shelf .