1. It's probably shallow of me, but I like to surprise my sisters when it's my turn to fix the main dish for family dinner. So, today, I fixed our entree in secret. I assigned Christy to bring cornbread and Carol to make a cucumber/tomato salad, but they didn't know what I was cooking up.
Well, Christy contacted us early in the afternoon to say she wasn't feeling well and so we postponed our dinner one day.
So, I'm going to give away my secret because I want to write about what I spent a couple of hours preparing this morning.
I started by finely chopping an onion, a few medium celery stalks, red pepper, and six cloves of garlic.
I put all of this in a bowl, heated up the oil in the Dutch oven, and browned both sides of four bone-in chicken thighs. While the chicken browned, I sliced up about 8 oz of an andouille sausage rope. I removed the chicken, put it aside, and browned the sausage. When the sausage bits were browned, I used a slotted spoon and put the sausage on a paper towel lined plate.
I drained a bit of the oil and fat from browning the meat and on top of the remaining fat I poured the chopped vegetables, stirring occasionally, until they were softened. To the vegetables, I added a cup and half of long grain white rice, salt, and thyme (no cayenne pepper) and stirred it all until the rice was covered with fat. To this mixture I added a can of diced tomatoes, a cup of my homemade crab stock, and a cup and a half of my homemade chicken stock and placed the four chicken thighs on top of this mixture. I put the lid on the pan, let it all cook for about fifteen minutes and then stirred the mixture and let it continue to cook until the chicken was no longer pink - about ten more minutes.
I removed the chicken and replaced it with a bunch of shrimp. I didn't like the way the shrimp were cooking atop the rice and vegetable mixture, so I melted butter in my cast iron pan and gave the shrimp a quick cook in the pan and returned the pieces to the Dutch oven.
I shred the chicken thighs, added this meat to the pot, and PRESTO!: Jambalaya.
I transferred the jambalya into a crock pot. My plan was to let the jambalaya warm, hoping the rice didn't absorb too much of the liquid. I did all of this before this Sunday's 2:00 fortnightly ZOOM meeting.
Then Christy texted us. We delayed dinner. I packed the jambalaya in quart sized deli containers, put them in the fridge, and I'll warm them up for Monday's dinner.
If, while being stored, I think the jambalaya got too thick or got pasty, I have leftover crab and chicken stock on hand to add, and, if need be, I can add more tomato liquid.
🤞🤞🤞
2. Today's ZOOM meeting included Bill, Diane, Bridgit, Colette, and me. We talked for a while about the experience of being with our parents in the last stages of their lives -- a very good discussion -- and then moved on to talking about books we read when we were younger and how much different they look when we return to them as older adults.
Somehow, at some point, we shifted our attention to cigarettes, to the series Mad Men, and to our experiences with our parents smoking, not smoking, quitting smoking, and the memories we have attached to the smell of cigarettes as well as the names of the brands. Honestly, it's kind of mind boggling what a central place cigarettes had in so many lives when we were kids and how how much different it is today. Somehow, either before or after the cigarette stories, we talked about food and what we eat and don't eat, and one of my favorite topics emerged: Sweet snacks! Doughnuts! Hostess snacks! Little Debbie's cakes! We also talked about non-snack food in which we were able to connect how rice is prepared in some West African countries to a meal Bill made for his kids combining ground buffalo meat, caramelized onions, Western Family beef gravy in a can, and leftover rice. I think he called it Buffalo Slop, but if I'm wrong, I'll correct this in a blog post in the near future.
3. After an hour or so on the phone with Debbie, I took my laptop to bed with me and rewatched the beguiling episode of Midnight Diner that involved ghosts. I wasn't really trying to figure it out so much as I wanted to enjoy again the coincidences and the mysteries of this story. I then watched the 6th episode of Season 2 and, like many of the stories in this series, it explored family separation and the impact it has on members of a family when a family member walks out. This episode was constructed around cream stew, thoughtfully and touchingly.
I continue to move slowly through this series because I like to let each story and the way they are told sink in. I know there are not an infinite number of episodes and I want to make watching this series last as long as possible.
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