Home > Celiac Travel Blog > Gluten free recipe - polenta, guacamole and wasabi nuts
Gluten free recipe - polenta, guacamole and wasabi nuts
Published 5 September, 2006
TweetAnd tonight's gluten free dinner is... Fried polenta with corn guacamole and hot wasabi nuts
Yes, it's a bit of a crazy mix of food - some people call it fusion, we call it 'whatever's in the cupboard'. We're polenta newbies, which might sound odd seeing as it's a gluten free staple, but I've not had any polenta that excited me before, and I can't say this time is much different. I guess if you see it as a pasta or rice replacement it's not bad.
Anyway, less of the waffling and onto the recipe. Oh, before we begin, I'd better mention this recipe is vegan too. You won't see many of those on Gluten Free Food Freak - we're a bit fond of eating animals.
Gluten free recipe: Fried polenta with corn guacamole and wasabi nuts
The Polenta (sort of ground corn stuff you'll get down your local health food store)
1 litre water
250g polenta
Good glug olive oil or chunk of butter
3 cloves crushed or finely chopped garlic
How to...
Boil your water, add the polenta, stir for about 4 minutes, add the garlic and oil/butter and spread into a shallow oiled baking tray about 1.5 cm thick. Leave to cool for 20 mins or so. Then fry like crazy on a griddle. I must say I didn't have much luck with this depite getting the griddle to nuclear temperatures - I couldn't get the black lines they showed in the recipe book. more like light brown lines. Still, it went a bit crispy.
Update: on the second go I left it for ages, and we got our black tramtracks. So you just need to give it long enough for the polenta to dry out and burn basically :-)
One person who is well happy with it is our baby Edith. Mind you, she has a cold, so perhaps it's the snot that is adding the flavour.
The Guacamole
2 cloves garlic finely chopped
A large handful of frozen corn, defrosted
2 avocados
Half small red onion finely chopped
Half a lemon's worth of juice
Fry the living daylights out of the corn on a griddle pan, leaving it for too long so it burns a bit. Mix it all together and adjust for taste.
Hot wasabi nuts
Now when someone first fed me these I was a bit nervous. Wasabi is the green stuff that removes the skin from your tongue if you eat so much as a pinhead of it. But somehow, frying nuts in it removes all the heat. It also creates a punishing gas in the process, so get your extractor on full.
Nuts - almonds, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, pine nuts - whatever you fancy really
Wasabi paste - I used a packet of powder that just contained powdered horseradish (that's what wasabi is, even though you might be forgiven for thinking it was something forced on the human race by an evil alien invader).
Dry fry the nuts until they begin to brown, stir the wasabi in. Fry for a couple of minutes.
How does it taste?
The polenta I've already talked about - fine as long as you don't expect too much flavour. The guacamole is superb - the sweetness of the corn kernels really works and it adds the flavour the polenta is missing. And eating nuts with a knife and fork is a bit tricky, but vegans manage it, so I must be able to as well. What with my enhanced co-ordination from all the omega-3's in the meat I eat ;-)
Well, that seems to have been a reasonable first effort at this blogging lark - don't know whether you agree or not. I'll try getting a picture online next.
