Making Jambalaya

“Hey,” I said to my room mate, “When you were planning to move in, you promised to cook for me. When is this going to happen?”

“When we have a clean kitchen,” he replied.

I will own up to being one of the worst house-keepers in history. Having way too many pets in the house doesn’t help much in this area. So I scrubbed, and put away, and growled at the animals till the kitchen was clean.

“Hey,” I said. “The kitchen is clean. If you hurry, it might stay that way for a minute or two.”

“Um…” he hedged, “You don’t have any pots big enough.”

“Big enough?” I raised my eye-brows in surprise. “You are only going to be cooking for two-unless some of my family shows up. How big do you need?” He mumbled something and went away.

A few weeks later, he said, “Ya know, most of what I know how to cook gets cooked in the oven.” That was a problem I could relate to-one of the biggest disappointments of my house was that the oven for the gas range didn’t work.

“That’s not going to get fixed very soon,” I sighed, thinking of Thanksgiving turkey, fresh bread and cakes.

“I think maybe I could make Jambalaya,” he said tentatively, “if we used a mix as a starter base.”

Since this was on the way to the store for the monthly shopping, I sent him to the grocery department to select people food, while I went to the pet department to pick up supplies for the four-footed members of our household. We returned from the trip with a box of Zatrain’s Jambalaya mix, a kielbasa, a package of chicken, and various other grocery items.

We were both tired that evening, so we had something easy to heat up and the ingredients were stored in various appropriate places.

Nearly 2 weeks later, the Jambalaya had not yet materialized. I decided to take a different approach. “What do you need to make Jambalaya?” I asked.

“I need boned chicken, a frying pan for the kielbasa and a pot to cook the rice in,” he replied. Then he added, “I’ve got Sky tonight,” (Meaning he had a planned group event on the video game, Final Fantasy.) “I won’t be able to make it tonight.”

“How about tomorrow?” I said. “I’ll start the chicken in the morning.”

The following morning, I put two leg quarters in a slow-cooker, and set about cleaning house. When my room mate finally made his way out of his room, I gave him the unwelcome news that we would be heading for the Laundromat-the washing machine had decided to flood. Setting the chicken on low, we made a laudromat run. On the way home, we picked up a green pepper and a white onion. When the laundry had been brought in, we began cooking.

My room mate prepared the rice according to the box directions. While it was cooking, he fried the kielbasa on one side, while it was still whole. I boned the chicken, and chopped up ½ each of the pepper and the onion. When the sausage had thoroughly fried on one side, he sliced it. He then put the chicken, the sausage and the chopped vegetables into the cooked rice.

I wandered away and read my book for a bit, while he kept an eye on its simmering. After about 25 minutes of cooking together, it was ready to eat. YUMMY!

It made rather a lot of food for two people, so we had it for supper again the next night, and I believe he had it for lunch the following day, and I had another supper of it.

Meantime, I had reserved the chicken broth, and I had just harvested the last of the green beans from my tiny garden. I snapped the green beans, removing their strings, and then washed them. I chopped up the other half onion and pepper, and added all the vegetables to the chicken broth. I left this to simmer for a couple of hours, then added the last of the left-over Jambalaya. The result was a delicious vegetable soup.

“Yummy, and not expensive,” I observed.

“Yes,” he replied. “Since mostly this kind of recipe was invented out of whatever people had on hand.”

“Peasant food,” I agreed. “Maybe we should try some more?”

He looked a little worried-sort of like my children used to look when they lived at home, and I was thinking of experimenting. But he didn’t say no. I have hopes of more cooking adventures in the future.