All through this cook, I was kind of tormented by the question of whether to serve the polenta and the chickpea-tomato stew separately or to combine them.
The stew would have been equally well served by bread (toasted or otherwise) but that would have made the polenta superfluous—holy starch-carb overload, Batman.
In the end, I went with polenta in the bottom of a shallow bowl, stew on top, romesco on top of that, gorgonzola on top of all of it. Worked great. Filling, very winter-friendly, a lot of flavor.
The saffron helps. My father used to really dislike saffron (or say that he did) partly because he thought it was overused and cliche in certain dishes. I get it—and since I was almost out, I had to rebuy some today and well, damn, I got a big arched eyebrow from the checkout clerk at the local grocery store who thought the cash register had made a mistake on the price. I explained that this amount would do me for about two years, but I don’t think she was convinced.
I could see some tampering with it—a bit of preserved lemon or smoked paprika in the stew itself, or a gremolata on top (the recipe even mentions something close to that).
The upshot is the book is, as I thought, a fine reference work with some useful specific ideas and some generally productive knowledge about specific techniques and ingredients. I’m not likely to pull it down off the shelf routinely unless I rethink my attachment to meat, but I will use it when the time comes.
(I should add that I didn’t really feel any sense that I ought to use meat stocks or other meat-based ingredients to jazz it up: it had plenty of flavor as is.)
It was a great and comforting dish to have on a cold winter's night. Tons of flavor.
I’d go for everything but the Gorgonzola. Would leaving that off harm it?