We all need staples for our daily and weekly meals, and a wonderful one to remember is humble polenta. A simple "mush" made from coarsely ground cornmeal, polenta is more versatile than we realize, and can brighten up our everyday meals without straining either our budgets or our already packed schedules. In plain English, it's quick and cheap.

Often (although not always), when I feature a specific food here on the web site, it's a fruit or a vegetable highly nutritionally endowed, full of antioxidants, fiber, good protein, etc. To be honest with you, polenta is not the star pupil in any of these categories. But there are other, more holistic, factors which make a food important and desirable. In the case of polenta, we have a delicious, soothing, digestible, colorful, filling base from which we can make both traditional, simple meals and also depart into more improvisational territory as we become bolder and more creative cooks.

And polenta makes it easier to eat whatever vegetables you serve with it, because it sets them off so beautifully. Satisfaction and comfort are not macronutrients, and they're not micronutrients, either. But they're soul nutrients, which are just as important.

You can make polenta soft and eat it in a bowl with honey for breakfast, or with a vegetable stew or just a little gorgonzola cheese or pesto for dinner. By simply cooking the cornmeal in less water, you can also make it firm, and then cut it into shapes and/or grill or fry it with a multitude of other ingredients.

Polenta is made from cooking coarse cornmeal in lightly salted water until thickened. The best product to use is organic stone-ground whole-grain corn meal, which you can find at natural foods supermarkets, often sold in the bulk bins.

Soft Polenta
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Yield: 4 to 6 servings

6 cups water
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup polenta (coarse cornmeal)
1 to 2 tablespoons butter or olive oil
Grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese (optional)

• Pour 3 cups of the water into a large pot, add salt, and stir in the polenta. Heat to a boil, stirring frequently. Meanwhile, boil the remaining water in a separate pot. When the mixture in the first pot reaches a boil, lower the heat, and simmer, stirring frequently, for about 10 minutes, adding additional boiling water from the second pot as needed to keep thinning it down. When it seems just right to you (this is very subjective!), remove the polenta from the heat, add the butter or olive oil, and spoon it into serving bowls. Pass the cheese... and also a pepper mill. Some people might like to add some extra salt. From here on in, tailor it to your own taste!

For instructions on making firm polenta, click here.

Polenta has a very interesting cultural (as well as culinary) history. The best writing on all of this is to be found in one very special, thorough little book, by one of my all-time favorite writers (culinary and otherwise), Michele Anna Jordan. I strongly recommend this book, both as great reading, and for fantastic recipe ideas that will surprise you. It's also lovely visually, and has some enticing color photos.

The name of the book is simply Polenta, and it's available from most online book resources.

Here's an excerpt from the introduction: (You can see how deeply Michele goes into both the poetic and the personal realms, while talking about food.)

The slow stirring of polenta has another important function: it relieves stress and lightens depression. there are times when we all long to retreat from the world, from its demands and pace, however briefly. You simply can't beat the soothing tonic of stirring a fragrant pot of bubbling cornmeal. Suddenly the world is reduced to a small sphere of warmth, aroma, and hypnotic motion; cares drift away on a fragrant cloud of steam and you find yourself relaxing in spite of your troubles. And unlike certain other escapes--television, a martini or two, Prozac--you are returned to the world with a tangible, albeit humble, accomplishment: a pot of perfectly cooked polenta. This is the time to make two, three four times the amount you need for one meal: pour what you don't eat immediately into tart shells, fancy molds, and baking sheets for use over the next several days. Wrapped tightly in plastic, your polenta will take you through the week.

However you get your polenta to the table, it links you with traditions that stretch back not mere decades or centuries but millennia, before a single stalk of corn flowered in European soil...