For Chinese New Year today, I am honoring my family by making the traditional Lowcountry dish of shrimp and grits (my father’s mother grew up in Charleston, South Carolina)—with a few modifications.

I used beautiful fresh polenta from Farmer Ground Flour (located in the Finger Lakes region and sold at New York area farmers’ markets), simmered (it’s 4:1 liquid: cornmeal, boil water, then simmer for 45 min, stirring every 8 minutes) and combined with grated Parmesan (1/2 c) and butter (2 tbsp), along with crispy pieces of Burgers’ pork jowl and big, pink shrimp sautéed for 2-3 minutes, shaking the pan, in the fat the pork jowl rendered, on top of spicy mustard microgreens from yesterday’s Union Square Greenmarket (the vendor apparently puts cayenne in his wool socks to stay warm on market days).

A very happy and warm New Year to you, and may we all bring honor upon our families this year—

Related posts:

1. a sandwich for breakfast
2. a bowl of jambalaya risotto
3. top o’ the carrot pesto

1. Mica:
   February 14th, 2010 at 8:59 pm

   Happy New Year to you too, Kristen! Ringing in the Chinese/Korean New Year just isn’t the same without homemade fortune cookies and salt-crust mackerel that we smash with a hammer…

2. Kristen:
   February 15th, 2010 at 2:13 am

   Thanks, Mica. I couldn’t agree more–I might have a belated party (with the cookies and the whole fish next weekend, and I’ll be missing your mad tuile-folding skills—

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Posted by Kristen Taylor on Sunday, February 14th, 2010, 3:23 pm * Filed in Food, holiday. * Tags: kristen, kthread, polenta, shrimp, taylor. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.