How Hard Cider Leads to Jambalaya

For what seemed like hours Shane and I debated what I should cook for dinner. I offered him two choices: leftover vegetable soup OR rice and chicken. And he responded with, "How about just chicken?" I said, "What will we have with it?" He said, "I don't know, just chicken?"

So we finally ended up settling on rice and chicken. I sent him to the man cave to play Little Big Planet while I created dinner out of 1.5 cups of leftover rice and a chicken breast.

I started by dicing the chicken and putting it in to fry with a little olive oil, lightly seasoned with coarsely ground black pepper and sea salt. I added marjoram for good measure, you can never over-marjoram chicken. (Use basil if you don't have marjoram, they are similar but not quite the same.)

I cooked the chicken for a few minutes, then stirred/flipped it to fully cook all sides. I was a little frustrated by the chicken flipping itself back over so I covered it in chicken broth and covered the pan to promote more even cooking. After a few more minutes I added the rice and pressed 2 cloves of garlic into it and stirred again.

About this time a nice Woodchuck Hard Cider sounded delicious, and I also thought about the recipe I had been meaning to make that I found on my Nintendo DS game Personal Trainer Cooking. You see, I was making rice and chicken which just happen to be a couple main ingredients in jambalaya. To the DS I did go, I found the recipe and decided I was not going to put squid or prawns into my rice and chicken, mostly because I didn't have them. I did add chopped bell pepper, vidalia onion and canned diced tomato, as the recipe called for. The recipe called for celery but I hate celery so I added celery seed, I know they are nothing alike and taste nothing alike, but I still add celery seed to recipes calling for celery. It makes me feel like I'm at least trying to follow along. I also threw in a bay leaf, it seemed like a good idea.

I added 1/2 cup water and 1/2 cup hard cider (no wine, plenty of cider) and then since Shane has a cough and sore throat I omitted the chili peppers in favor of a few dashes of chili powder, 1 tsp of paprika and a healthy sprinkle of parsley. I tasted the rice and chicken turned jambalaya and added more black pepper and more hard cider, simmered about 10 minutes to reduce the liquid by more than half.

I tasted again, pronounced it delicious and called Shane for dinner. He burned his tongue, but loved it anyway! Even though I severely deviated from the recipe, what was in our bowls looked exactly like the picture, it was amazing.

By the way, I had an epic battle reattaching the v key in order to post this blog. I valiantly persevered to bring you this tale. Darn dirt under the keys, anyway!