After flouting my dinner picture around the interwebz this past weekend, I’ve had a couple of requests for the recipe for this:

Greens and cheese grits!

The grits I have were purchased in Georgia’s Low Country on one of my cross-country road trips and, unfortunately, I’ve never seen any like them out on this side of the continent. Thank god for mail order…

I’m pretty sure Anson Mills ships their grits.

To cook the grits, I used a teeny-tiny crock pot. It holds about 2 cups (if you filled it to the brim), has no heat or time control, and came with my big-ass slow cooker. I think it’s for keeping dip warm but I’ve been using it for making my porridge overnight (in conjunction with an outlet timer); this is the first time I’ve used it for grits. I will definitely make this the primary prep method in the future…they were just incredible.

So, start with 1/4 cup of stone-ground grits, 1 cup of water in the teeny-tiny crock pot, and a wee bit of salt. (Okay, if you don’t have a t-t crock pot, you can use the stove top method.) The crock pot was plugged in for two hours.

Once the grits were started, I prepped the greens. This batch was made with a bundle of chard (white and red together) from the farmer’s market, just washed and then chopped. (Collards, turnip greens, beet greens, or kale would be just as good though.) They went into the pot with about 1/2 to 3/4 cup of chicken broth. You want enough broth to have some “pot likker” but not so much that you have soup. Once it’s come to a easy boil, turn down the heat to low and add some ham steak, chopped into cubes. Ideally, I would have used Tasso or some other spicy ham but it was nowhere to be found so it was Niman Ranch ham steak instead! If you’re using plain ham like I had to, add some Louisiana Hot Sauce and/or some cayenne pepper to spice things up a bit. Then turn the heat down to low, cover your pot, and let it simmer.

Grate about 1/4-1/2 cup of Dubliner cheese, depending on how cheesy you want your grits to be. When the grits’ two hours is up, add the grated cheese along with 1/2 T of butter. Stir until the cheese and butter are both melted.

Serve the greens on top of the grits with some of the pot likker added. I wouldn’t say no to a little pepper vinegar sprinkled on top of mine either…

This entry was posted on Monday, January 31st, 2011 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Food, glorious food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.