Three Minute Polenta

For Snowed-In Blizzard Day, I made an extremely fancy dish from my favorite cookbook, The Voluptuous Vegan by Myra Kornfeld.  The meal included a carbohydrate base of baked polenta triangles with broccoli rabe. Kornfeld suggested reducing the usually burdensome cooking time by mixing the stone-ground polenta with quick-cooking corn grits. She wrote that it should take 15 to 20 minutes of gentle bubbling for the dish to thicken into genuine polenta. For some reason, when I stirred 1 Cup each of the polenta and grits into the 6 cups of salted and oiled boiling water, they instantly became polenta. It took me a minute or two of panicked water-adding before I realized it had happened.

But Sarah, you ask skeptically, was this "instant" polenta anything like the real deal? Yes, dear reader. Exactly like. I stirred in the blanched and chopped broccoli rabe, let the polenta cool and harden, had my handy assistant carve it into triangles, brushed it with oil, and baked it for 40 minutes at 375 degrees into perfectly delicious food. Since I don't know what I did, I'd be curious to hear if anyone replicates this "method."