In general, I find myself cooking dinner, on a budget, with not a lot of time after work. I’m trying to get in better shape as well, so the food I make on a regular basis needs to be:
- Healthy
- Cheap
- Delicious
- Fast
Roughly in that order of importance. Most of the recipes I’ll post here will meet those criteria.
Pilaf is a general term for a class of dishes where uncooked rice is browned in oil, and then cooked in broth, like biryani, paella, risotto, or jambalaya. It’s what I call this dish, which is sort of an easy weekday dinner recipe.
- 1 pound sausage, ideally uncured kielbasa for a mild, slightly sweet dish, or andouille for a spicier version
- 1 medium white, yellow or vidalia onion, diced
- 2 fistfuls of peas
- 1.5 cups of rice (I used Kokuho short grain rice)
- 2 cups chicken broth
For this recipe, I use a cast iron skillet, but you can use anything that will fit all the ingredients together, with enough
Cut the sausage into slices with a slight bias to give it more surface area, and saute it with a few tablespoons of olive oil under medium heat to get some of the fat and juices from the meat out into the pan. For extra flavor, you could add a tablespoon of butter with the olive oil… If you’re a pussy.
So saute the sausage, stirring infrequently, until it’s browned on both sides. Remove the sausage from the pan into a bowl, leaving the oil, and then put in the onions, and let them cook until they’re translucent. If you have some garlic cloves, crush them and put them in with the onions as well. Now, mix the rice in, stirring to coat the raw rice evenly with the oil and moisture in the pan. Put the sausage back in, and mix it until you’re confident it’s all together, then put in the broth. Once it’s boiling, cover it, set the heat to medium-low, and let it simmer for about 25 minutes. You’ll want to stir every 10 minutes or so, to make sure the rice on top cooks properly. The moisture will almost be gone by the end, but don’t panic. Put in another 1/4 cup of broth if you need to. Stir in the frozen peas at the end, and cover again. After 5 minutes, it’s all done. The rice at the bottom should be slightly charred and crunchy, and the top should be moist and fluffy. Makes a main dish for 4 people.
Hard mode: No butter, no seasonings other than those present in the sausage, broth, garlic, and onion.
I really like uncured kielbasa because of the fresh, slightly sweet taste matching the sweet flavor of the peas. I try not to use butter partly because of the saturated fat, partly because I think it’s a crutch. Using spicy sausage helps keep the dish from being bland, but if it’s too plain for you, serve it with a more savory side dish (I had potatoes au gratin from a box) or slather it with sriracha hot sauce, you fucking philistine.
i support more recipes of this type! looks pretty tasty except i kind of hate peas…
Well, the peas are really optional– I originally added them because I had them on hand, and didn’t want to make a vegetable dish separately.
haha, i figured it was something like that. we’ll probably try out the ground beef/mushroom variant listed below sometime this week. this is the kind of dish i like making due to fillingness, quantity and ability to become leftovers…
TWO FISTS OF PEAS
My professor taught me to make rice like this and called it dirty rice. I usually make it with ground beef instead of sausage and mushrooms instead of peas. I cook the ground beef with some salt and some worcestershire sauce, then drain and pop in at the same time as your sausage gets popped in. The texture of the rice becomes slightly sticky at the end of the game, because the rice has absorbed the cow oil. I also throw in a metric ton of cayenne pepper, but that’s not really necessary, just a preference. It makes this kind of warm, sticky happiness–great comfort food. :3
The dish is indeed called ‘dirty rice’. The main exposure I’ve had to it is the Popeyes version (fast food delicious), and Zatarains from a box (as much sodium as a salt lick), so I’d be interested in your recipe/having some when next you make it.
Ahah, I was thinking of dirty rice, too! I usually make the vegetarian option (because I am too lazy to cook meat, as we know) but it is essentially what you’ve described, only with more mushrooms and cayenne – spiciness key when you’re using relatively bland foods like mushrooms and ground beef but perhaps less so with sausages.
I really liked this dish the only time I’ve seen you make it. I’m definitely trying this.
Odd question on iron pans: Do you heat your pan to carbonize everything still on it before scrubbing it clean? I haven’t on my preferred method yet. Assistance would be appreciated!
If things are stuck to it, I’ll boil water in it. If it’s just a little stuff at the bottom, I’ll carbonize it, and rub with some salt to clean. If things are really a mess, I’ll do a combination of both.
I played this game on hard mode and got the good ending.
I just made this with: sweet Italian sausages for kielbasa, shallots for onions (because I only had shallots around…), and two (2) bay leaves. The rice took a while and I had to add water a couple times to get it nice and soft, but the end result was delicious!
Nice, I think shallots would work just as well. There’s a danger of adding too much water at once, as I found out the hard way, but if you keep it a little at a time?
I just made this recipe as well! Delicious. It was kind of a hard mode remix: I used beef chorizo as well as sausage, and mushrooms instead of peas. The chorizo made it more spicy and mexican-flavored than it would have been otherwise I imagine. Two cups of chicken broth for 25 min was just about right… I added a quarter cup of water near the end. Would make again!
[...] I just had this (again) for lunch with leftover dirty rice – though my semi-Cajun roommate informs me that it’s not true dirty rice unless it’s [...]