Friday, January 16, 2009

1001 Easy Jambalaya ( Cajun / Creole One pot meal)

 Jambalaya :

Jambalaya is a one pot meal with rice, meat and vegetables. It is the Cajun / Creole adaptation of the Spanish Paella. Replace the seafood in Spanish paella with meats and it starts resembling Jambalaya.


Cajuns & Creoles :  
Acadia, (a region in Eastern Canada) was a part of the French colonial empire in the 1700’s. Under a treaty, the French ceded it to the English. The Acadians refused to swear loyalty to the English and were evicted under the Great Expulsion. Many eventually settled inLouisiana, a former French colony. Louisiana already had a large native French speaking population, a large number of them being the second born sons of aristocrats seeking adventure and fortune in the New World, later came to be called  Creoles. Louisiana in turn was ceded by French to Spain. The Acadians morphed under the Spanish and Creole influence and became a distinct ethnic group - the Cajuns. Bell pepper, onion, and celery are added to almost everything and are called the holy trinity of Cajun cuisine. Parsley, bay leaf, spring onions and dried cayenne pepper are common Cajun flavourings. The Cajun refugees, forced to live off the land, rebuilt their cuisine around locally available rice, vegetables, crawfish and game meat – setting  “a table in the wilderness” Cajun meals are simple - rice, skillet cooked cornbread vegetables, game meat / seafood. Creole cuisine is more elaborate with its European influenced recipes and French sauces The Creole version of Jambalaya uses tomatoes and Cajun versions do not. 


With the intermingling of so many  cultures, Lousiana cuisine has given rise to a delightful array of unique dishes like Jambalaya, Gumbo ( thick stew , usually with Okra) and eTouffee ( Seafood stew, served with rice).

As with 1001 one page cookbooks, 10 different bases are combined with 10 flavouring agents and ten additives to create a thousand easy Jambalaya recipes, numbered from 000 to 999. 

The bases
 A variety of meats as listed in column 1 are used as a base.

The flavouring
Celery, onion and bell peppers form the basic flavouring. A variety of other flavouring listed in column 2 can also be used.

The additives
Almost any vegetable as listed in column 3  can be used .

1 comment:

Rohit Kumar Chemudupati said...

Your presentation is the best way to cook. Breaking down the recipes into essential parts and showing them so nicely just makes me want to try cooking even more stuff and gives me ideas of more variations.
Thanks a lot for these delightful One Page Cookbooks!

Food Consultancy / Licensing / Crash Courses

Contact siramki@gmail.com for complete Food consultancy from concept to completion.

Customised one page cookbooks now available for pressure cooker / microwave / mixie / masala & other cooking product manufacturers. Replace bulky recipe books with easy to refer One page cookbooks and watch your sales soar !

Twecipies

Blog Archive

Cooking is fun - Duplication is a pain !

"It is extraordinary to me that the idea of creating thousands of recipes by mixing building blocks takes immediately to people or it doesn’t take at all. .... If it doesn’t grab a person right away, ... you can talk to him for years and show him demos, and it doesn’t make any difference. They just don’t seem able to grasp the concept, simple as it is". ( Thanks Warren Buffett !)

"What's angering about instructions in many cookbooks is that they imply there's only one way to cook a dish - their way. And that presumption wipes out all the creativity." Cook dishes your way - Download  1001 South Indian curries now and learn to cook, not to duplicate ! ( Thanks Robert Pirsig !)

"Recipe purity is no different from racial purity or linguistic purity. It just does not exist. Cuisines are alive and change all the time. What is traditional today was esoteric just a few decades back. So being a 'foodist' is as bad as being a racist !

About Me

My photo
Chennai, Tamilnadu, India
Okay, let me start from the very beginning. 1500 crore years ago, with a Big Bang, the Universe is born. It expands dramatically. Hydrogen forms, contracts under gravity and lights up, forming stars. Some stars explode, dusting space with the building blocks of life. These condense into planets, one of which is Earth. Over time, self replicating molecules appear, multiply and become more complex. They create elaborate survival machines (cells, plants, animals). A variety of lifeforms evolve. Soon, humans arise, discover fire, invent language, agriculture and religion. Civilisations rise and fall. Alexander marches into India. Moguls establish an empire. Britain follows. Independence. Partition. Bloodshed. The license raj is in full sway. I'm born. India struggles to find its place. Liberalisation. The Internet arrives! I move from Tirupur to Chennai. Start a company. Expand into Malaysia, Singapore and the Middle East. Poof! Dot com bust. Funding dries up. Struggle. Retire. Discover the joy of cooking, giving, friendships and the pleasures of a simple life. Life seems less complicated. Pizza Republic, Pita Bite and Bhojan Express bloom !

Looking for Treatment?