Red Beans and Rice

Happy New Year, everyone!

I thought I’d start off 2013 with a post that has nothing to do with holidays or new beginnings or New Years in general. It’s just something that I made recently that turned out pretty well.

My entire experience with red beans and rice is what I’ve gotten from Popeye’s on those few occasions when hubby really needed a Louisiana food fix. I wasn’t a huge fan of it, but it was all right, and since I had a few pounds of Cajun sausage in my freezer, I thought this would be a nice dish to try for him. I’m a nice wife sometimes.

I started off with a pound of dry red kidney beans. Dry beans intimidate me but Google is my friend.

I started off with boiling them and letting them sit for an hour or so.

Meanwhile, I chopped up some veggies (onion, green pepper, celery) and sauteed them in olive oil with some garlic

Then I forgot to take pictures for a few steps. Basically, I rinsed the beans and then put them back in the pot with about 6 cups of fresh cold water. I also added a few bay leaves and some cayenne pepper.

Then I added thyme…

Blurry sage…

Similarly blurry parsley (I need to focus on photography skills in 2013)…

And Penzey’s Cajun spices.

And I’m going to be perfectly honest, I don’t know what this is. It’s not in the recipe. Could it be just a dark picture of partially-added Cajun spice? Probably. But I couldn’t swear to it.

Oh yeah, don’t forget to add the veggies!

Here ya go. Bring it to a boil, and then simmer for two and a half hours. I think I did closer to two hours. I also think I added a healthy dose of salt, too. I have learned that Cajun food requires it.

Then add your sliced sausage, imported by the inlaws (no pictures; sorry!), and simmer for another half hour or so.

Up until this point, I was seriously, seriously questioning this dish. Once the sausage was in, though, it took on a whole different quality. The Cajun sausage here really made a difference in the aroma and in the taste of the broth.

Serve over fresh, hot, fluffy rice. And that’s it!

The smokiness of the sausage really mixed well with the sage and thyme. Like I said, I was skeptical of this dish until the sausage was added. But then it got yummy. Really yummy. I’m not sure how to describe this.

But I am pretty sure this was better than Popeye’s!

Here’s the recipe, if you’d like to give it a shot. Not sure how it would be without real Cajun sausage but if you’re like me and from the North, you might not know the difference

Roast Chicken

You may have noticed that I took a little hiatus from posting over the past few weeks. To be honest, I just wasn’t feeling it. I guess it was a combination of feeling a bit overwhelmed with juggling all the things in my life (working two part time jobs, school, dogs, holiday get-togethers, helping hubby make a few extra bucks by doing some work for a friend), so it wasn’t my highest priority. Also, I was worried that I’d been annoying my facebook friends by linking to my posts too often. I have plenty of people that annoy me to death on facebook and I really didn’t want to become one of those people. Yet I sense that the majority of people who read this blog do so because I post those links. I’m a little confused, then, as to whether I should continue this blog. I enjoy it, yes, and I feel a sense of pride  about it, but do people read it?

Anyway, I’ve had a break and I think I feel better. Also, I finally discovered pictures of roast chicken that I accidentally buried in a folder of pictures from my sophomore year in college, and I was excited about this because I’d been looking for them since August.

And I’m drinking wine. But that’s totally unrelated.

This was a recipe posted by Ree on The Pioneer Woman Cooks over the summer. I made it a few weeks later and it was delicious and especially photogenic.

See? Pretty ingredients.

I started off by zesting the lemon.

And tossing the zest in a bowl.

Then I took some of the fresh rosemary off its sprig

and chopped it all up.

I threw it in the bowl with the lemon zest

And took a poorly lit and oddly focused picture of some softened butter thrown in there, as well.

Here it is all mixed up.

Basically, you put a whole chicken on a greased baking sheet and smear the butter all over it.

In retrospect, this seems pretty disgusting. I feel as though I used far more butter than I was supposed to. But I feel as though I should also mention that the lemon zest smelled wonderful and it was easy to get carried away. I swear.

Next, halve the lemons. Squeeze one over the chicken itself.

Shove some sprigs of rosemary into the cavity,

Followed by as many lemon halves as you can get in there.

And then roast it until it looks like this and the internal temp is where it should be (don’t make me go look it up. I don’t remember what that is and I’m feeling lazy from a day of playing in the snow with huskies, alternated with watching movies with hubby).

Let it rest for at least 10 minutes, then serve it up! I served it with broccoli and rice. Simple and easy.

And delicious.

Okay, yes, it was a LOT of butter. That came across in the taste. It was really tasty, though I do remember thinking that it was a bit much to take in. Next time, I’ll scale it back. But the tasted of the butter, combined with the lemon and rosemary, was really good overall. The meal was easy to put together and tasty, and it also made for good leftovers. If I recall correctly, they went toward a barbecue chicken pizza or something like that.

I recommend clicking over to Ree’s original post and giving the recipe a try. Her pictures are far more professional than mine, anyway.

And if you have any thoughts on the future of this little blog project, please leave a comment!

Dirty Rice

I was looking for more things to do with the shallots that my Aunt had sent me a few weeks ago. Hubby had some ideas, having grown up using shallots in Cajun rice down in Louisiana. This was my attempt to combine his verbal accounts with a copycat recipe for Popeye’s Cajun rice (aka dirty rice).

I started off with a stalk of celery.

And diced it up pretty finely.

Then I did the same with a green bell pepper.

Next, I turned to the shallots.

And diced a couple of those babies up, too.

Finally, I used a few cloves of my Aunt’s homegrown garlic.

With all that prepped, I started browning a pound (or maybe a pound and a half) of ground beef.

Then I added my diced celery and green pepper.

Finally, I added the garlic and shallots.

When it was done, I drained the grease and added some long-grain rice.

And then water, of course.

Along with some seasoning.

A little bit of Cajun seasoning…

And a little bit of cayenne.

Then I put the lid on and let it simmer for a while.

When it was done, I fluffed the rice and gave it a taste. It was a little bland, so I added some Tony’s creole seasoning. I didn’t use it before because it’s so salty, but at this point I decided it could use the extra flavoring.

All mixed in, this is what it looked like.

In the end, it could have used more seasoning. I had been real careful not to overdo it because I’ve ruined food by using too much creole seasoning, but I really should have dialed it up a notch. Other than that, though, not bad. A good first attempt at dirty rice!