Son of a gun, we'll have big fun on the bayou

Once upon a time, I tried to make jambalaya.

Before this time, I had never taken a stab at Creole cooking. Beyond the base Holy Trinity and the inclusion of Andouille, I really had no idea what I was doing. This probably heralds about how well I was destined to fare.

I scurried about, seeking the closest approximations to Andouille and tasso that I could find in my suburban Connecticut Stop & Shop. Long story short, I purchased everything I thought I required, got home, and realized that I didn’t have long-grain rice. A-whoops.

Like a good little quarter-Italian boy, I did have a jug of Arborio rice in the cupboard. So I cobbled together some sort of jambalaya risotto. Given how poorly-planned the whole adventure was, it turned out edibly.

On a whim, I decided to recreate this experiment over the weekend, but with a clearer course of action. I'm sure that jambalaya-purists would scoff, but a well-planned jambalaya risotto seemed like a nice spin on something that I'm already pretty comfortable making. If I was going to spend an afternoon making a cauldron of lunch, it needed to be done up proper.

In preparation, I waded through a handful of jambalaya recipes online, and even found one that was risotto-centric. I had a skeleton with which to make food! With something resembling a recipe in-hand, I stalwartly plodded off to Key Food in hopes of finding delightfully smoked meats.

A side note: I grew up in a kitchen where quantity is measured in shakes, glugs, and handfuls, and where one knows broth is ready once it has "had the shit boiled out of it." As such, this recipe is really just a loose guideline that will change from batch to batch (and to taste).

• three chicken thighs, skin-on and bone-in
• two big ol' links of andouille sausage, cut into sassy little meat-coins
• a half-pound of tasso ham, cubed (If you can find it - I couldn't, but I found a smoked chunk of pork shoulder that seemed vaguely analogous.)
• one green bell pepper, diced
• three or four stalks of celery, diced
• two or three carrots, diced
• one big onion, diced
• four or five cloves of garlic, minced
• one little can of diced tomatoes (I'd use fresh ones if I was cooking for someone else, but I'm a Lazy Gus.)
• a cup and a half of arborio rice
• one cup of white cooking wine (I don't really know anything about wine, but I know it makes risotto happy.)
• four or so cups of chicken stock (preferably low-salt if you're buying it instead of making it)
• two notches of butter or so
• a blurb of olive oil
• tbsp. oregano
• tbsp. thyme
• as much cayenne pepper as makes you happy
• two or three bay leaves
• "Cajun seasoning" (You can make your own through some combination of cayenne, paprika, salt, onion powder, garlic powder, etc. Again, I'm lazy and would probably be more discerning if I wasn't planning on eating the whole cauldron myself over the course of the week.)
• Parsley, salt, pepper, etc.

So here's what I did:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 or so. Peel back the skin on the chicken thighs and liberally shake your "Cajun seasoning" on the meat within. Then fold the skin back over to create some sort of magical meatpouch of wonderful spiciness. If you're feeling saucy, you can shake a l'il spice on the bottom on the thighs, too! Bake the thighs skin-up, so all of the luscious skin-fat cooks into the chicken, making it better for your mouth and worse for your burgeoning gut.
2. Get to dicing. I threw all of the veggies into one giant bowl so I could marvel at how nice they all look together. And so I could dump everything in at once. Fewer cross-contamination fears are my favorite parts of one-pot cookin'.
3. Set a big honkin' pot on medium heat, and melt your butter with a spot of olive oil. Toss in the andouille and tasso, and wait for them to release their bounty of lipid-juices into the pot.
4. Dump in the carrot, pepper, onion, and celery. Keep it all moving until the kitchen starts to smell like awesome, and then keep it moving some more until the carrots soften up. Since all of the meat in there is precooked, feel free to make sure that it's sufficiently soft with your mouth.
5. Once everything has softened up, dump in your garlic, bay leaves, and rice. If you've made risotto before, you'll recognize this as the part where you just keep stirring and adding more juice, about a cup at a time. If you haven't made risotto before, this is the part where you keep stirring and adding more juice, about a cup at a time. I started with the wine, then the can of tomatoes, then the stock. The order probably makes an important difference, but I mostly just wanted to get some ingredients off of my limited counter space.
6. Really, just keep stirring and adding liquid for a while. Arborio rice sucks up a lot of liquid and spurts out a lot of starch, so the pot will get progressively creamier as it cooks. This is a good time to grab a beer or crank the music for some kitchen-dancing. I think I've settled on "Eight Days A Week" as my favorite song for cook-dancin'.
7. Once the chicken is cooked and cool enough to play with, remove the skin and shred the meat with a pair of forks. Toss it in the pot and mix it in, preferably while eating a greasy wad of chicken skin. There's a reason I look like this, and it probably relates to eating greasy wads of chicken skin.
8. By now, you should be on the last cup or so of stock. You might need more than four cups, you might need less; basically keep going until everything looks creamy. Toss in your oregano and thyme, and go nuts with the cayenne. I know I did. I also threw some fresh chopped parsley in there at the end. You can salt and pepper to taste, but I didn't find it necessary.
9. Get Other Ed to take a picture of it for you, because your camera is broken. This step is optional, and its success hinges upon whether or not Other Ed happens to be around.

The photo is a bit dim, but it was a pretty fantastic dinner. And lunch. And it will continue to fill those roles for a few more days, because this recipe makes a lot. If anyone wants to barter goods or services for jambalaya, hit me up.

Oh, and apparently I'm a food blogger now.