Tony's Food 101: Girlfriend's House Jambalaya

Okay, so after sort of a long hiatus, Overeducated and Well Fed is back in business, and we're starting back off with a super-easy dish that's both healthy and cooks up in a single pot, making cleanup fast too (hence why I made it at my girlfriend's house).

Thinking about jambalaya conjures images of New Orleans, Mardi Gras and lots of capsaicin - the stuff that makes chilis so hot. While those things are all true, jambalaya shouldn't be relegated to the category of mystery and exotica by non-Southerners. Once you break down the components, it's actually a really accessible technique for making flavorful one-pot meals. You basically have meat, vegetables and rice. They are all cooked in a particular order and way, making jambalaya more of a technique than any single dish. Today's jambalaya looks more complicated that it actually needs to be, and that's by choice.

So that I could a) impress my girlfriend (and maybe her roommates too) and b) so that I could illustrate exactly variety jambalaya is capable of, today's version has chicken, andouille sausage and shrimp. Feel free to use one of these, any two of these, or all three of these, depending on what you have on hand. Likewise, don't confine yourself to the vegetables I used either. You don't even have to use the tomato if you don't want to! Apparently, in New Orleans, Creole (or Red) Jambalaya contains tomato while Cajun (or Brown) doesn't. Any deep southerners among the readership may feel free to validate or dispute this, by the way. I even messed with the seasonings, not having any pre-made Creole or Cajun seasonings on hand over at the girl's place. I'll include instructions for both in the recipe below, because what I used came out pretty tasty!

One definite Do Not is using a pre-made jambalaya mix. Pretty much all seasoned rice or pasta box mixes are loaded with salt, which is associated with high blood pressure and therefore vascular disease (e.g. heart attacks and stroke). Making this stuff yourself is easy, and you can control the amount of salt, fat (and all the other tasty bad-for-you) things that go into it. Make stuff from scratch and live to cook another day.

Girlfriend's House Jambalaya

• One large onion, diced.
• Two cloves of garlic, finely chopped.
• One or two large carrots, diced.
• One each red and green bell peppers, again, diced. By the way, when I say "diced" I mean cut into about 1/4 square in flat pieces. Here are more detailed instruction for those who want them.
• Two boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into bit-sized cubes.
• 1/2 lb andouille sausage, cut on a bias to make oblong or ellipse-shaped slices. I like Trader Joe's andouille chicken sausage, and the smokiness of it helped me get around not having any cajun/creole seasoning to use.
• One pound of frozen, cooked, tail-off shrimp. Any size is fine. Thaw them according to package directions prior to use. Actually, if you use the super huge ones, you may want to think about using two pounds so that they're a little more populous on your plate. You can also substitue crayfish (if you've been to Ikea lately) or langostine tails.
• One large can of diced tomatoes. The fire-roasted type are good in this dish, but avoid them if you're already using andouille sausage -and- cajun seasoning with a smoky flavor built in. Do not drain. Again, the tomatoes are all-together optional.
• One regular can of red kidney beans, drained and rinsed.
• A tablespoon or two of Cajun or Creole seasoning, to taste, and two big pinches of salt. Alternatively, you could do like I did an use the same amount of a salt-containing all-purpose seasoning mix that you like (I like Jane's Krazy Mixed Up seasonings), along with a dash of cayenne pepper and two of chili powder.
• One cup of low salt chicken stock/broth - use your own if you've made it!
• Two big handfuls (about one cup) of white or brown long-grain rice.

Add all of the veggies and a glug of olive oil to a shallow pot with a cover and sweat over medium heat - until the onions are just translucent.

Figure 8.a - I sweat vegetables.

Okay. Now turn the heat up to medium-high add in the chicken and sausage and let them brown for a while, stir it up occasionally. Add in your seasonings at this point. Once they are all brown and tastied-up, add in the kidney beans and tomatoes, then the stock, shrimp and rice. Bring the whole thing to a boil, then turn the heat down to low, cover and let it cook 20 minutes if using white rice, 40 if using brown.

The basic skeleton of the technique is 1) half-cook veggies, 2) add meat and half-cook, 3) add miscellaneous ingredients, stock, rice and simmer until rice is done.) See, you didn't believe me, but wasn't that easy?

Figure 8.b - The usual suspects.

Figure 8.c - The finished product.

Today's pictures are complements of my girlfriend, and her camera that's way better than mine.

Next week, we're going green... and no, I don't mean broccoli rabe.

Tony's Food 201: The Whole Chicken and it's After Effects

We're upping the course difficulty here in the New Year. Today, we're going to taken on an entire chicken.

Figure 10.p - Per my girlfriend, we apparently have a bright future of chicken-raising ahead of us. Our six future-chickens' names are (as decided by a committee made up of me, my girlfriend, my college friends, and a good deal of home-made pumpkin vodka): Henrietta, Gertrude, Nugget, Minerva, Galadriel and Cluck-cluck. (http://www.windsorfamilyfarm.com/)

Okay, I lied. Cooking a whole chicken isn't really all that difficult. I usually just throw it in an oven and call it roasting. What to do with it afterwards is where things get complex. It basically breaks down into two broad categories: meat and other. What to do with the meat is easy, you eat it. Plain chicken can get mind-numbingly boring, so we'll address that two ways: how to get piles of flavor into the chicken pre-roasting, and interesting things to do with all that bird. Turns out, what to do with the "other" category is pretty easy too, and we'll get to that in this article as well.

Whole Roast Chicken

• One whole "roaster" chicken, these are generally larger than the fryers. Remove the packaging, pull the packet of miscellaneous parts out of the cavity, rinse the whole thing in side and out
• Two whole lemons, cut longitudinally into long wedges
• 8-10 cloves of garlic, smashed with the flat side of a knife and your hand.
• What ever herbs you feel like using. I generally switch it up based on season - sage and rosemary in the cold months; thyme and bay leaves in the warmer months. Chili peppers would be a good match with the lemons and the bay.
• A bag of fingerling potatoes
• Two white or yellow onions cut into quarters.
• Salt and pepper.

After the chicken is all rinsed, pat the entire inside and outside with sea salt and coarse ground black pepper. Stuff the cavity full of lemon wedges, garlic cloves and herbs, but leave a few of each aside. Make some cuts into the skin on the breast side of the chicken and stuff herbs and garlic cloves in there as well. Make a couple more cuts in the skin on the folds of the wings, and put a lemon wedge in each fold, under the skin, as well as any garlic and herbs you can fit in there. A certain obese celebrity chef and enemy of public health does something similar, but rather than using herbs, she crams lumps of butter under the skin. Tie the legs together over the opening of the cavity with twine. I generally put mine in a shallow pyrex casserole dish, but feel free to put it on a roasting rack over a roasting pan. It will be dryer, you may need to baste it. Arrange the potatoes and onions around the chicken. Bake for about 2 hours depending on the size of the bird in question, and how long the package tells you to roast it.

Okay. So now you've had a meal with some delicious lemony, herby, garlicky chicken and sides. Now you have a pile of lemony, herby, garlicky white and dark meat, and a pile of bones, cartilage, skin and fat. Oh, and that packet of miscellaneous parts you pulled out at the get-go. The meat you can just eat as is, until of course you get bored with it like I usually do. The rest of the creature is the problem. This is where home-made chicken stock comes in.

Taking Stock of the Situation. (no, not that Situation).

Basically, take everything that you roasted that's not chicken meat, onions, potatoes and lemons and throw it into your biggest pot. Throw the lemons out, they will make your stock bitter. Add in whatever roasted herbs and garlic you recover from the pan. You can add new onions and maybe even carrots and celery if you like, but it's not necessary. There should already be salt and pepper inside the cavity and on the skin. Cover it to about 2-3 inches above the mess with cold water and let it simmer on the stove for 3-4 hours. Do not boil it, this will make it extraordinarly cloudy. When you're done, strain it and put it into what ever containers you have on hand. Mine mostly goes into old Cool-Whip containers and then into the freezer. You can use it in soups, to flavor rice, really anything.

Doing Something Different with What You've Got

Okay, there are only so many times a person can eat plain roast chicken. Yes, even if you've gussy-ied it up with various and sundry aromatic plants. So what to do with all your new-found poultry wealth? I usually end up making some sort of salad from the meat for sandwiches for my lunch. One of my favorites is a Provencal version, which includes the chicken (obviously) chopped fine with a knife for food processor, mayonaisse, a couple spoons of olive tapenade, cherry or grape tomatoes cut into sub-bite-sized pieces, and any other vegetables I have lying around: carrots, celery, red onion all work nicely, all chopped just as fine as the chicken. It makes a mean sandwich to bring for lunch, all the other flavors mask how sick of the chicken you are, and gives you some lean protein and raw veggies in your diet. Sure beats some of the alternatives out there.

So you have the assignment for the week, as well as a couple homework projects to keep you busy in the kitchen as well. See you all back here next week for one last thing to do with your left over chicken.