Kari's Blog

Tonight I decided to cook chicken and sausage jambalaya. The recipe looked promising (and easy) and Andrew has been asking for some type of “cajun” meal for a while.

So I start chopping and cooking and mixing and get the whole meal put together really easily. I’m thinking, “ok, this is great…it smells good and it was easy, this is going to be a great meal!”

In the recipe it says to cook it for 40 minutes in a dutch oven at 350. It has uncooked rice in it so of course it has to go that long. So after I stick it in the oven I sit back, relax and wait for the miracle of jambalaya to occur!

40 minutes later I pull out the dutch oven to check on it. It smells amazing and my mouth starts to water until I look inside and see tiny little pieces of rice. It has not cooked!!!! So what does any girl who’s hungry (and impatient) do? Stick it on the burner, high heat, and cook the tar out of that rice!

Finally, after 25 more minutes the rice cooks. It was an ordeal, and a lesson learned: never rely on the cooking times from fancy pants ovens.

You might be asking yourself now…”was it worth it? All that trouble?” Believe me y’all….it was.

So now, thanks to my wonderful dutch oven and Southern Living, we will have jambalaya until Christmas.