A couple of Saturdays ago we had the annual Cajun Barbecue in the backyard of a co-worker’s house. He supplies the place, along with ribs and a turkey to barbecue (the sauce makes it Cajun, really), and the rest of us are expected to bring a Cajun side dish, or beer. Usually this follows the pattern you’d expect: guys bring the beer and potato chips (barbecue flavor), and gals (Miss Manners says the Cajun nature of the event makes the usage okay) bring the side dishes. Though one guy brings his trademark cooler full of Jell-o shots, and and one lady usually brings something distinctly non-Cajun from the Korean restaurant by her house. But all that’s okay, ’cause we’re all Cajun friends this one day, and usually everyone else pretty much follows the script.
Last year I was fairly disappointed by most of the side dishes. They weren’t hot and spicy enough for my taste, and then the ones that WERE pretty good got gobbled up fast. The cooks had only brought small dishes of the stuff. This year I was determined to correct that situation. I decided to be a girly-man for one year, and bring a side dish, and bring enough of it for everyone, to boot. Even though I’d never made it before, I thought jambalaya might be nice. And easy.
About a week before the big event, I dug my entire cookbook collection out of my kitchen drawer to look for a jambalaya recipe. The collection had a recipe for shrimp creole on page 748, but no jambalaya. I was sorely disappointed in Better Homes and Gardens. Action was obviously called for, but what?
Luckily, it turned out the host had a Cajun cookbook, I found out on Monday. He would gladly bring it in the next day so I could copy a recipe. Unfortunately, I was sick the next day, and didn’t get the book until Wednesday. Wednesday evening, at softball, I realized the book was still on my desk, the recipe uncopied. I’d get it next day. One thing led to another, and I ended up taking the recipe home in my briefcase Friday evening.
Saturday morning of the party I went the grocery to get the ingredients. Justin Wilson said his recipe fed four; I was determined to feed at least twenty. Thirty-seven dollars and change later (this was shrimp jambalaya), I was headed for home with two bags of stuff, including green onions and garlic and parsley many other things that need chopping.
Chopping and peeling and dicing and mincing five times what a recipe calls for isn’t easy, I’m here to tell you. I discovered a trick, and you can use it if you want: find out how many green onions, for instance, go into one cup, and then just multiply your requirement by onions. Five cups times three green onions per cup equals, ummmm, fifteen green onions. Well, hell, I only bought eighteen, so I threw them all in. Ultra-scientifical, and it IS only jambalaya.
The party started at one; I started my chopping and stuff about eleven. At one I finally got my Creation on the stove, in the big black kettle thingie that’s usually reserved for boiling pickle jars (a whole ‘nother story, Homemade Dill Pickles). It weighed about fifteen pounds, and was filled almost to the brim with all the chopped up junk and the rice and the shrimp. And, of course, ample hot stuff, including two liberal dollops of the Spicy Hot Pepper Sauce I’d picked up at The Pork Pit in Montego Bay. This concoction was supposed to boil “until the water is gone”, and then simmer 45 minutes. You got any idea how hard it is to bring a mass like that to a boil?
About 2:30 I decided the water was gone and the thing might possibly survive the transport to the party house for the final simmering phase, so it rode over on the floor of the car. It behaved fairly well.
Nearly the same time as the ribs and turkey were finished, the jambalaya was ready, as well. Perfect timing on my part, I thought, and I was pretty darn proud. All I’d done was missed about two hours of beer-drinking time. No problem – I thought I might be able to catch up. The host had vetoed any more hot sauce being added, so I was a little wary that it might not be all I’d envisioned, but I set it out on the buffet picnic table anyhow. I was surprised to note that more people than usual had brought side dishes this year. There were going to be lots of things to sample.
“Who made this orange stuff?”
I recognized that lady’s voice, and meekly raised my hand. It sounded like her chewing-out voice.
“This stuff is fantastic! YOU made this? I can’t believe it!” She and her kids and her boyfriend had big heaping helpings on their plates, and were chowing it down.
“Here, have some more!” I ladled some on. Unfortunately, other people had found it too spicy, or had pigged out on too many ribs, or had loaded up with other competing side dishes. The twenty helpings of jambalaya weren’t going too fast. Everyone else was almost finished eating, and half the kettle remained. And oh! I forgot to mention – someone who knew better told me usually jambalaya is a main dish, not a side, so what I’d made was twenty full main entrees. Oops!
When we cleaned up the table, and took the food inside, there was still about half. The host’s girlfriend started scooping it into some fake Tupperware looking things (you know, the type bachelors have – old margarine tubs and like that). They were quickly full and there was still jambalaya in the kettle. I went out to get more stuff off the table and heard a hell of a commotion in the kitchen, and when I came back in there was no more jambalaya in the kettle. It was all over the kitchen. Seems a jambalaya fight had somehow broken out. It cracked us all up, ’cause of course, we’d been drinking.
I took the empty kettle home with me that night and set it on the counter. Next day when I did the dishes, there was obviously going to be no room in the dishrack for that thing, so I just left it there with the lid on. I’d catch it later that day, after all the other stuff dried off.
Well, I didn’t. Something came up Sunday, Monday night was softball, and then Tuesday night I was busy, too. Wednesday my sister was arriving at noon for the 4th of July weekend, so I only had time to do laundry and straighten the place up, and that didn’t include doing the dishes. So the jambalaya kettle sat there, with the lid on, from Saturday night until after my sister left, eleven days later.
When I finally took that lid off prior to washing it, there was Lifeforms. We aren’t talking about the usual disgusting mold looking crud that grows on old cottage cheese. What was in the jambalaya kettle was the most interesting and varied selection of molds and funguses and whatnot I had ever seen in my life. Probably I have seen all these guys, somewhere, individually, but I’d never seen them all together, and I was utterly fascinated. It was like a little mold/fungus zoo in there. There were little flat dark green ones, large hairy light green-grey ones, round bumpy yellow ones, one that looked like it had little white flowers, a dark flat-black bumpy one that looked like burnt wood looks in the pit of a fire, and wispy stringy blue ones. Many more I cannot remember. I felt like a killer when I finally put the kettle in the dishwater (soft hands Palmolive).
I still have the jambalaya recipe. Let me know if you want it. Feeds twenty, easy. Feeds Lifeforms, too.
Author/Copyright: Tiger, of tigerwhip.com fame Date Written: 07/10/1994