If you live in the South, you are bound to have come across the question of what to do with leftover grits. There is no such thing as cooking too much (many?) grits, since a full pot of grits cooking on the stove provides just what you want to eat that morning (night?) plus the extra benefit of having leftover grits.
Since a full pot of grits takes just as much effort to wash and clean afterwards as a half pot of grits, you may as well cook enough grits for you and the family to eat right then and there, then whatever is leftover can be put in the refrigerator. That's right, northern friends, cold grits are almost just as good as warm grits.
Cleaning a pot out in which you have cooked grits is a real challenge. Let's just say the automatic dishwasher is next to useless in this case. Pots with cooked on grits on their insides just laugh at automatic dishwashers.
Of course, fresh warm grits taken right out of the pot are somewhat fluid (depending on how long you cooked them), and when you scoop a pile of grits onto your plate and put a pat of butter on top of it, the butter begins melting rapidly, then slides down the side of the pile of grits as it finds the path of least resistance. Soon, what's left of the pat of butter sits at the side of the pile, thinking it has escaped.
But, no, that's when you take your fork and lift the butter up and smash it back into the steaming pile of grits, giving it a slight stir. By the end of this procedure, you wind up with enough butter mixed in with the grits to make them taste more buttery than gritty. Some like it more one way than the other, but to each his own.
But the grits that are leftover in the pot, the grits that didn't get scooped and put on the breakfast plate, these are the grits that begin an adventurous journey into the refrigerator. They are scooped up and dumped into a glass (or other suitable container), then put in the fridge to cool. Sometime later, whenever the desire for grits arises again, just take the glass out of the fridge and slide the now solidified mass of grits out of the glass onto a plate.
The path now diverges. Some people will take a fork and start prying off chucks to eat right then. Some people will attempt to pick up the whole solidified mass and try to eat it like some kind of grit popsicle.
But my wife tells me her family would take the cylinder of cooled down grits, cut it into rounded slices, then throw those into a pan greased with bacon grease and fry those puppies. I personally have never done that, being of the group that likes to eat their leftover grits straight out of the refrigerator. Probably with a fork. At that point, however, putting butter on the cold grits does absolutely nothing. It just falls off to the side.
And such is the fate of leftover grits. It's just another episode in the "Greatness of Grits," soon to be a major motion picture.
