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Autumn is coming – you can feel and smell it in the air. It makes me sad that the summer is over for another year – a patchy summer at best – but I love the fact that I’ll be able to wear big jumpers and make big pots of comfort food (legitimately) again.

If you follow me regularly you’ll know how much I love polenta, how perfect then is this dish of baked polenta, topped with a rich tomato sauce, meltingly soft guanciale and eggs? So perfect that I ate the entire skillet over one day by myself. Hey, I’m just padding up for the winter…

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Comfort food, for me, is a big bowl of white rice and tender chicken. Luckily for me, Hainanese Chicken Rice or hoi nam gai fan as it’s known in Cantonese, is exactly that. I make this far too often for my own good – I could probably live off it quite happily. I’d be very fat… but very happy.

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I know what you’re thinking. You’re reading the title of this post and thinking to yourself, “another polenta recipe?! Jeez Jackie, we get it, you’re obsessed with polenta, move on with your life already,” and you’re not wrong, yes, I am obsessed with it but I’ve got a new obsession: drowning cooked polenta in layers of tomato sauce, smothering it with cheese and baking it in the oven. This, I’ve recently learned, is known as pasticciata and is a kind of lasagne with polenta instead of pasta. Oh yeah. This stuff is good.

Even better this is the last post in my series on homemade stock (which you’re probably sick of too, by now)! Polenta and homemade stock? That’s what I call perfection.

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Today was just one of those days. Do you know what I’m talking about? One of those days when you really need to curl up into a ball and sleep for hours because everything you touch somehow turns to doggy-doo-doo. My colleague and I were both having one of those days at work and were wandering around in a daze, despite the multiple cups of coffee. I think it’s because the hot weather appears to have subsided momentarily, instead leaving us with a very stereotypically-grey-London-haze. What we really need is a good thunderstorm to clear the air – the humidity is somewhat ridiculous right now.

Instead of doing what any other intelligent person would do in such a state (make a quickie dinner and then sleep for hours), when I got home I decided that a good, rich, comforting dish was exactly what I needed to make me feel better. Cue the tartiflette. Or at least my version.

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