Polenta Three Ways, or Three Mitigated Disasters

For tonight's episode we thought we'd bring you polenta three ways: polenta sticks, a polenta "pipe bomb" (store-bought polenta tube stuffed with a mozzarella stick), and sweet polenta bread. This amounted to a menu equally ambitious and untested, and flying, recipe-less, by the seats of our pants resulted in more than one fail. So we're saving most of the footage for the blooper reel (which you'll find on the extra features disc of our DVD box set).

Nonetheless we emerged from this cornmeal mire with two successful ventures. First, the polenta-wrapped mozzarella was achieved by salvaging some of the stove-top polenta we made for the polenta sticks, letting it set up a bit, and then coating it generously around a mozzarella string cheese stick. The end result strongly resembled a Twinkie, but was far more delicious. Second, we dug deep into the K+ADFS archives to salvage the sweet polenta bread. Just as we did to resuscitate our fried Christmas cookie endeavor, we had to coat this dough in oats to prevent it from disintegrating in the oil.