Impress your guests at your next holiday party with these crispy polenta fries with roasted garlic aioli! Super simple to make, aioli is a French-inspired sauce made of garlic, mayonnaise and lemon juice. 

This post is sponsored by Sprouts Farmers Market for their #SharingHealthyHolidays campaign. All thoughts and opinions about this original recipe are my own.

Wow, Christmas is just three weeks away! The holidays are approaching fast, and it’s the time of year where it gets hard to stick to a healthy lifestyle. Don’t get me wrong, I love pumpkin pie, turkey on Thanksgiving, ham on Christmas, and our family’s delicious homemade green bean casserole. But its a good idea to sprinkle in a few healthier dishes to keep the balance. Today I’ve partnered with Sprouts Farmers Market to share a healthy dish you can serve at a holiday buffet or get-together. 

Polenta fries are one of my favorite side dishes or appetizers. They’re SO easy to make and you can season them however you want. They bake up crispy just like a French fries and make the best vehicles for tasty dips. Back in the Spring, I posted the recipe for these Smoky Polenta Fries with BBQ Ketchup. Today, we’re using them as dippers for a delicious roasted garlic aioli sauce! 

Aioli is a French/Mediterranean style sauce usually make out of garlic and olive oil, and in some regions, other emulsifiers are used such as egg or mayonnaise. My aioli is closer to a garlic mayonnaise, incorporating lemon juice. 

Have you ever bought tubes of polenta before? I LOVE them! Sometimes I slice them into rounds, or to make fries, I cut them into strips as shown in the pictures below. You can make your own polenta with corn meal and broth, but it takes a while for the polenta to cool down and be firm enough to slice into pieces that will actually stick together, so I prefer to buy it already cooled and compressed in these tubes. 

I received a cast-iron garlic roaster for my bridal shower, and I used it to make the roasted garlic for this recipe! Usually when I roast garlic, I slice the top of the entire head and drizzle it with olive oil and then wrap it in foil. For the cast iron roaster, you still slice off the head and drizzle with oil, but then you just pop it in the roaster! 

Polenta itself is so tasty– I like to just bake the fries with olive oil, salt and pepper and then use them for dipping into sauces like this aioli, ketchup or BBQ sauce! Polenta does have fiber and protein so this makes it a healthier carb option for snacking and side dishes. 

Have you ever tried polenta fries? Or aioli? 

Be sure to try this recipe out for your next holiday party! Here’s the recipe for Crispy Polenta Fries with Roasted Garlic Aioli: