Happy Blogaversary to me: Macalaya

Good gravy.  Has it really been eight years since I started this blog?  I guess it has been.

I must admit I've been wondering about what to post for a good long time.  Weeks of time.

Then I met someone at a party and we started talking about mac and cheese and I recalled this recipe I in winter's waning weeks.  Of course I searched for it on this blog.

Wait.  What?  I didn't post it?

Oh yeah.  I've been a bit preoccupied.

Then I realised this would be a great recipe for my blogaversary post. No, it's not a fancy-schmancy recipe. That explores a cuisine or marks an adventure. It's simply the result of two simultaneous cravings: jambalaya and mac'n'cheese.  Hardly ground breaking or earth-shattering.  But it's good, unpretentious food.

Isn't what this blog is about? Food-based diarisation of my kitchen adventures--how I feed myself and my friends and family, devoid of marketing and and groupthink influences?  And how better to feed my favourite people, but with experimental hearty comforting food that combines ideas?  After all, if you can't experiment on friends and family, then whom can you experiment on?

For those of you who are list-phobic, you may be hyperventilating at the prospect of organizing 30 ingredients, and making two components (well, three) to make one dish.  But it's all manageable: make a simple Creole-influenced mixed meat stew, then make a cheese sauce, then mix with pasta and bake.  Easy-peasy.

The end result is perfect as cold weather sets in--warming, spiced and perfect shared with favourite people, or curled up on the couch with a very good book.




Macalaya (or Jambalaya with Macaroni & Cheese)
Serves 4-6

Ingredients 

Jambalaya
120g (~4.5oz) peeled & deveined shrimp, cut into 1cm/~1/2” pieces
120g (~4.5oz) chicken (dark &/or white meat), cut in 2.5cm/1” cubes
olive oil
1Tbsp tomato paste
½ medium onion, cut into 5mm/1/5” dice
½ medium bell pepper (green/red/yellow), cut into 5mm/1/5” dice
1 celery rib, cut into 5mm/1/5” dice
200g chicken or andouille sausage, innards removed from casings
3-6 garlic cloves, minced (to taste)
120g (125ml) tomatoes, diced (1.5 Roma, 1 beefsteak)
2-3 bay leaves hot sauce (to taste)
5-15ml (1-3tsp) Worcestershire sauce (to taste)
250ml (1c) chicken stock

Jambalaya spicing: 
3.75ml (3/4tsp) paprika
2.5ml (1/2tsp) salt
2.5ml (1/2tsp) garlic powder
1.25ml (1/4tsp) black pepper
1.25ml (1/4tsp) onion powder
1.25ml (1/4tsp) dried oregano
1.25ml (1/4tsp) cayenne powder
1.25ml (1/4tsp) dried thyme

225g (0.5lb) rigatoni or elbow macaroni (see notes)

Cheese sauce: 
28g (1oz/2Tbsp) butter
28g (1oz/3Tbsp) ap flour
1/8 tsp cayenne (or to taste)
300ml (1c + 4Tbsp + 1tsp) half &half
85ml (1/3c) chicken broth

Cheese mix (see notes): 
100g (3.5oz/1c) shredded old cheddar
100g (3.5oz/1c) shredded mozzarella
100g (3.5oz/1c) shredded Gruyere

salt and pepper (to taste)

Method: 
Start with the jambalaya:
Toss the chicken and shrimp into the seasoning and let sit as you prepare the rest of the jambalaya--be sure to put the shrimp in a separate bowl as it's one of the last ingredients used. Pour heat a bit of oil in a pan, add the tomato paste and fry until the paste tinges to a brick red. Remove from pan.

Slick the bottom of the pan with oil and sweat the onion, celery and bell pepper. Once translucent, add the sausage and par cook. Add garlic, stirring until the air becomes fragrant with its oils. Add fried paste, tomatoes, bay leaves, hot sauce, 5ml/1tsp Worcestershire sauce and chicken stock. Bring to a boil while stirring.  Once it bubbles, turn down heat and let simmer for about five minutes add the chicken and coat with the sauce, stir and cook until the chicken is cooked. Turn hob to low, balance flavours to taste.

Prepare the pasta cooking water as you get on with the cheese sauce:
You can either use salted water or use ratio of 1:1 water to chicken stock. Regardless, the water should be as salty as the sea. Once the liquid comes to a boil, add the pasta and cook to al dente. Drain the pasta, reserving about half a cup of cooking water.

For the cheese sauce:
Mix the cream with the chicken stock.

Melt the butter over high heat until foamy. Stir in cayenne and flour and cook until the mix I blonde (well, strawberry blonde, given the cayenne). Slowly whisk in the stock mixtures until smooth. Bring to a boil and then reduce the flame to medium. Let simmer for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally until the mixture is slightly thickened. Remove from heat, add cheeses, a pinch of salt and a couple of pinches of pepper and whisk until melted. Balance flavours to taste (keeping in mind the pasta and jambalaya are already seasoned). Keep warm until baking.

Time to bring it all together:
Preheat oven to 200C/400F; 180C (fan-assist)/375F(fan-assist)

Butter a 3L/3Q (eg: 33cmx23cm/13”x9”) oven proof dish.

Mix the hot cooking water into the jambalaya. Add the shrimp. Mix with the cooked pasta. Tumble into prepared dish and pour the cheese sauce onto the pasta. Swirl it all together so the macalaya is well mixed. Bake for about 20 minutes. Turn off the oven and let sit for another 10 minutes.

Remove from the oven let cool on the counter for about 15minutes before serving.

Notes 

• Pasta: You can cook it in the usual way, or you can cook it in a weaker broth in a 1:1 ratio of water to chicken broth
• Cheese mix: flavours aren’t set in stone, but you want a combined volume of about 3c
• Jambalaya spicing: if you don't want to make your own masala, then use 15ml/1Tbsp of your favourite Cajun spice mix.

cheers!
jasmine
I'm a quill for hire!

The contraption: Olive and lemon meatballs with tomato sauce

Computers. I love them and hate them all at once.

As a writer and editor I love how they can make my lot a bit easier—distributing drafts, tracking changes, sending off the final version—its all easy, peasey, pudding and pie. Add the Web and all the electronic loveliness that comes with it, and there’s little doubt that this collection of plastic and wires is rather spiffy.

But when things go awry…say when my wretched ISP goes down, speed becomes a crawl (thanks to multiple “critical” patches) or for whatever reason an app no longer does what it’s supposed to…and I just want to chuck this thing out the window and go back to quill and ink.

This is one of those moments. My six year old laptop is now showing signs of age…grindingly slow, Sahara-like heat and now it just shuts down whenever it gosh-darned feels like. These I can handle. What I’m having issues with is the spontaneous key-popping.

Yes, key-popping. There I am, happily Tweeting or emailing and all of a sudden keys started flying off and clattering all around me. Square tiles jettisoned like quills off a territorial porcupine. Right now the bane of my existence is the letter “I” that keeps leaping off ¡nto the w¡ld blue yonder.

Well, until I can afford a new machine, Zippy will have to be mended. A keyboard transplant is in the works and for the next while I’ll be computer-less. I hope to have Zippy back before long, but it all depends upon how long it takes my repair shop to get in the replacement part.

Sigh.

Before I take this machine off to the shop, here’s the next part of my slow cooker series. Enjoy…

This is what I’ll call a “transition recipe,” the type of recipe that bridges warm and cool weather, one that’s just hearty enough to feel fed, but not so much to leave you feeling lethargic. It’s also a bit of a transition from the slow-cooked meats that marked my earlier slow cooker adventures.

I must admit that when I saw slow cooker meatball recipes, I really didn’t see how a slow cooker made the process easier for the home cook. You still have to make and cook the meatballs separately as well as start the sauce off on the stove. Really, it would be much simpler—including a couple fewer pieces to wash—to do it all by stove top.

Regardless if you use a contraption or a covered Dutch oven, this isn’t a bad recipe. Adding lemon and olive to the meat mix adds an earthier but at the same time a bit of a refreshng flavour to the meatballs.


Olive and lemon meatballs with tomato sauce

Adapted from Sara Lewis’ Ultimate Slow Cooker, p68
Serves 4

50g (0.5c) chopped black olives
grated rind of 0.5 lemon
500g (1lb) ground beef
1 egg yolk
salt and pepper, to taste
1 onìon, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
375ml (1.5c) canned, puréed tomatoes
125ml (0.5c) chicken or beef stock
0.5tsp dried basil
dried chili flakes (optional)

Mix olives, lemon zest, beef, salt and pepper together. Form meatballs (this recipe will form about 20 tablespoon-sized meatballs). Let rest in the fridge for about 20 minutes.

Fry in olive oil until cooked. Set aside.

To make the sauce, sauté the onion in the oil and beef drippings, add the garlic, tomatoes, stock, salt and pepper. Let come to the boil.

Transfer the meatballs and sauce to the slow cooker and cook on low for 6-8 hours. About an hour before it's done, stir in basil and pepper flakes and continue cooking.

cheers!
jasmine

I'm a quill for hire!

Daring Bakers: Lasagne of Emilia-Romagna

• Recipe's origins: Lasagne of Emilia-Romagna from "The Splendid Table: Recipes from Emilia-Romagna, the Heartland of Northern Italian Food"
• Recipe's orginator: Lynne Rossetto Kasper
• Our hostess: Mary of Beans and Caviar
• Our co-hostesses Melinda of Melbourne Larder and Enza of Io Da Grande

The March 2009 challenge is hosted by Mary of Beans and Caviar, Melinda of Melbourne Larder and Enza of Io Da Grande. They have chosen Lasagne of Emilia-Romagna from The Splendid Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper as the challenge.

As much as I love being a part of the Daring Bakers, I've often felt there's too many challenges involving sweet baking. Don't get me wrong, I love cakes and cookies and pies and whotnots, but I think it's important to remember that savoury baking can require just as much skill and patience as sweet offerings.

Is savoury baking the poor cousin to much-loved and sought-after sweet baking? Not in my books.

Needless to say, I was doing a little dance of joy when I found out our lovely hostesses chose home made pasta as an integral part of our challenge.

My Dear Little Cardamummy once attempted homemade pasta. It was...umm...disgusting. I don't think she followed a recipe and what she produced was doughy and stodgy and sat in my tum like a lead-lined brick. I did my best to discourage further experiments. Whether or not she continued, I don't know as I think I've blocked all other attempts at feeding me her pasta have been blotted out of my memory.

Fast forward to this past Christmas. The lovely people at KitchenAid met with me as a follow up to their 2008 Kitchen Trends Report (Adobe Acrobat required), which I co-authored, and offered me a pasta machine attachment for my stand mixer. Of course I accepted and immediately thought of a couple of things I wanted to try it out on...pasta and non pasta alike.

Yeah, I didn't roll the pasta sheets by hand, as required in the challenge. But I had a new piece of equipment and I so very much wanted to try it out. For those of you who have been salivating over the attachment--I'm quite happy with it--after hand kneading the dough, I ran it through the rollers a few times and came up with a very lovely product.

Home made pasta is quite easy (and I'm sure if Mum had a recipe, her attempt would have been much more successful). The only thing I would do differently is purée the spinach instead of finely chiffonading it. The chunks were a bit large and I think was the cause for a few nervous moments of dough tearing during early rolling stages.

I used the challenge's bechamel, but substituted half the milk for heavy cream--I had some in the fridge that needed using up. My word the sauce was good. I had to be careful to keep from...ahem...oversampling.

The ragu was my own which I made and froze a few weeks before I knew about this month's challenge. Quite simply: soften diced onions, carrots and celery in olive oil, add a small tin of tomato paste and fry for a bit. 300g each ground pork, beef and veal, then a 798ml tin of unspiced puréed tomatoes and a good glug or two (or three) of red wine. Add salt, pepper and basil, stir well so the meat is nicely mixed, cover and set simmer for about an hour or so. Stir every once in a while. Check for doneness and flavour, spice as you see fit.

I didn't want an overly tall dish, so I limited my layering, reserving the rest of the pasta and sauces for future use. The finished lasagne was delicious--one of the best I've had.

To see what the other Daring Bakers did, please visit our blogroll.

cheers!
jasmine

Milk Calendar Mondays: Chicken and Fresh Spinach Tortellini

Dare I say it?

This is the sort of thing the Milk Calendar people should be aiming for when developing and choosing recipes for their calendar.

You read right. Two passing grade recipes in a row. Who'da thunk it?

When you actually read this month's recipe for Chicken and Fresh Spinach Tortellini, you might easily figure out why it works: the dairy component (in this case milk) serves a real purpose. That is the milk is supposed to be there and substituting it for water or stock or wine would probably make the recipe worse.

Milk wasn't used to boil rice. Milk wasn't used as pasta water.

The milk was used for sauce. And not some wretched, bland and pallid imitation of what should have been a bold and flavourful coating. It was a sauce that worked well enough and easily adapted to the cook's preference.

In keeping with the calendar's raison d'être it is an extremely easy recipe. And in keeping with the other recipes, it is designed so as to not offend Canadian's stereotypically timid tastebuds. The "adventurous" additions really aren't that daring: bitter greens (Swiss chard) and bacon (pancetta)--but I'm a half-bacon-fiend who's more than Swiss chard friendly, I went that route.

I made a couple of changes to the recipe--instead of baby spinach, I used grown up spinach (I'm beginning an antipathy for baby veggies--apart from the price, I'm increasingly unconvinced of their flavour) and my dining companion has a citrus allergy, so I didn't use the lemon rind, but to add the teeniest bit of sharpness used a about a quarter tsp of white wine vinegar.

It was a pretty effortless affair and the recipe came together in a rather quick fashion--I think I had dinner on the table within about -45 minutes, from start of prep to dishing out the pasta. To keep it as a one-pot dish, I crisped the bacon in the cooking pot, removed the pieces, but kept the fat in the pot when whisking the flour into Ahe milk. The flavour was pretty good--it would definitely benefit from a bay leaf and the bacon should be manditory--tried it without and it didn't work for me or my friend...and if you aren't making your own stock and like me used an insta-boullion, you may want to keep the bacon fat in the dish because of the lovely all-over depth it added to the dish.


cheers!
jasmine

Milk Calendar Mondays: One-Pot Tomato Parmesan Rotini

Workasaurus has been wreaking havoc overtime, travelling up and down the 401, visiting Ivonne and me, crashing on our chesterfields and begging rides to and from our offices.

I don't know about our Dear Little Puff of Cream , but whenever the Worky shows up over here, it seems as if its rather presumptuous cousin, Deadlineadactyl also arrives in tow, shrieking out calendaric countdowns, sometimes skipping a date or three. Yeah, they are both favourites right now, and the prime reasons for me neglecting all my bloggy friends.

To say the least, right now bulk cooking and reheating home-made frozen goodies is how I'm keeping myself going...well, that and lots of coffee...lots of Tim Horton coffee (and before the Canadians ask, I've only one ONE coffee out of about 20-30 cups...meh).

Anyway, this weekend I decided to venture into the March Milk Calendar recipe for One-Pot Tomato Parmesan Rotini. Given how...um...not good the February travesty was, I was apprehensive as to whether I could stomach this one.

It's easy and quick (I made up about five-ish servings in about 30 minutes). Yes, I'd like it to be zippier--substitute the parm with asiago, perhaps tinned tomatoes with roasted tomatoes as well, but on the whole, this milk-cooked pasta with chunks of broccoli isn't too bad--better than cafeteria food. I think if I make it again, I'd really want to put in some good chunks of bacon...pretty much everything is improved with bacon.


cheers!
jasmine