Espetadas com Milho Frito (Portugal)

In the recipe book this is translated as swords of meat - which I think we'd all agree is quite an impressive and enticing title. Not only that, it describes the dish in itself perfectly.  Its long skewers of beef and chicken, served with polenta; the polenta being my only issue with this recipe.


When we tried cooking this recipe, Soph and I had taken the baby to visit our parents at their house in the Dordogne, France. Our brother and his family were also there, so it was quite the family reunion and there were plenty of taste testers.  Everyone was eagerly awaiting the swords of meat, and we were dreading the fried polenta, since most of us had never tried it.  

My brother and I, however, were cautiously optimistic about polenta.  Having never had it before, our optimisim was based solely on the fact that it's a relatively common grain and must be quite tasty considering the amount of recipe's we'd both seen that used it.  

My current recipe called for the polenta to be boiled, shaped flat and cooled before cutting it up and shallow frying the pieces.  

My brother, however, had heard a recipe for making cheesy polenta, which sounded a little more appealing to most of us, so we decided to have a polenta-off.  I made the polenta from the recipe book, and my brother made the cheesy polenta (which was much simpler to make - basically cooking polenta and adding grated cheese). 

While my polenta was cooling, I got to work on the skewers.  The meat had been marinading for about 45 minutes by the time we were ready to cook it. Allegra recommends at least an hour so they were not quite in for long enough but we hoped for the best.  An interesting thing about this recipe is that Allegra recommends putting crumpled baking sheets at the beginning and end of the chicken skewers to stop the meat from drying out. I'd never heard of anyone doing this before but it sounded quite logical. She also recommends using a cut of steak that is quite fatty for the beef skewers.  Unfortunately, I was not at the store when the beef was selected so the cut I was given to work with was not fatty at all but looked to be a delicious cut of steak none the less.  Hoping that the trick worked well, I put crumpled baking sheet pieces at the ends of the beef skewers too and put them all on the bbq.  

With the help of the bbq masters that are my dad and brother (and a meat thermometer), the skewers were cooked beautifully. 

Everyone gave high praise for the swords of meat and how excellently they were cooked, though they should have been marinaded for longer.  The polenta, however, received very different reviews.  The group was split over those who preferred the cheesy polenta (which basically tasted like grainy cheesy mashed potato) and those who, if pressed to choose one, said they would prefer the fried polenta (which was an odd waffel-type concoction).  

The main comments on the recipe from the many taste testers were that kebabs with only one thing on are much easier to cook properly, and that no one likes polenta.  

While the polenta did not go down as well as we'd hoped, my brother and I are still convinced that we can find some way of cooking this grain that our family will like - since it is so widely used.  This threat also led to many a comment about how exactly we will sneak polenta onto the forks of our unsuspecting family members.