No, seriously, don’t. It’s not a comeback so much as a “hey this is a thing I used to do”. While this space has gone almost completely un-used for a little over a year, I was struck with the urge to change that yesterday evening when I was putting together some Kielbasa and Peppers. I don’t know if it was the feeling of life inspired by the new baseball season, the moderately sunny weather implying that “yes, we actually did make it” to the whole of the Northern Midwest who survived one of the harshest winters in recent memory, or simply the random inspiration that can befall an on-again, off-again cook and blogger when the free time presents itself; but the point was I made a thing and took pictures of that thing while it was in the process of becoming a fully finished thing. So in the interest of subjecting all readers of this space to even more of my typical run on sentences, here’s some food I made, as always, Lineup card is below:
There’s some spices which aren’t shown here because I didn’t think of them until later. Also, despite Green Tea’s prominence in the background, it’s not really on the team.
- Kielbasa (no idea how much it is but it’s the sausage looking thing there)
- Green Pepper
- Onion
- Can of Diced Tomato
- Can of Whole Tomatoes (So…I really just wanted 2 cans of diced tomato, thought I had that…but turns out one was whole so it ultimately doesn’t matter but that’s what’s going on here)
- Brown Rice
Boil some water and then once that’s rolling throw in the rice and cook per package instructions:
This is rice in water…not much to see here. BUT CHECK OUT THAT SPOON HOLDER THING. I never had one of these before but it’s really changed my “resting utensils on the stove” game.
While that’s cooking, just chop everything up. Since the peppers and the onions are going to be prominently featured as forkable items, go lazy with the cutting and leave ’em big.
Fun Fact: Wearing glasses will protect you from the eye watering during onion cutting. It’s caused by chemicals coming out from the onions as you cut them so the eye covering prevents anything from happening. In theory at least.
I gave the Peppers and the onions a head start with some olive oil over medium heat to start to cook, this ended up not being really all that necessary but it seemed like the proper thing to do at first.
This really starts to smell amazing very quickly. But, just keep an eye on the onions for burning, the sausage should release enough fat to keep everything happy.
As that sizzles away, you can work on getting a spice mixture together. I kind of just thought of this off the cuff as I would be throwing in a lot of unseasoned tomatoes . Now, the onions, peppers and kielbasa are flavorful themselves, but once that bland unseasoned tomato sauce got involved I couldn’t really k now exactly what happened, so I threw together some paprika, salt, pepper, celery salt, garlic powder and turmeric that I would add once it was time for the sauce. NO, it’s not measured in any real accurate way, I was just grabbing pinches of stuff until it looked like I had enough for how much tomato volume I was throwing in. Measuring spices continues to elude me:
By now, your entire dwelling should smell incredible. I’ve extolled the virtues of Kielbasa on this blog before, but man I’m going to take a second and reiterate just how good it smells for you right now. It’s sweet, it’s spicy, it’s a food candle. If you’re into sausage of any kind you owe it to yourself to get down on some Kielbasa, you will not regret it. When it looks like the below (and you’ve confirmed the sausage is cooked to 165 Fahrenheit by testing w/ your Therma Pen) then you’re ready for the sauce:
Honestly, you could just skip the whole sauce part if you’re good to go right now really.
The onions should have caramelized a bit, the peppers should just be starting to soften and again, everything should smell heavenly. Add in those tomato products. I smashed up the whole tomato to make it similar to the diced, juice and all. Add in the spices too:
Make sure you mix everything around, as the spices hit the heat they should basically make your nose cough and exclaim “Damn…that’s some strong shit”.
Cook for 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally until the tomatoes start to cook down and you cook off a bit of the liquid. The idea here is that we want SOME liquid to help sauce up and soak into the rice when we’re done, but not so much as that we haven’t incorporated it all fully. Bring it up to a boil and then lower it down to a simmer. When you get something that looks like this, you’re pretty much there:
Now comes the “fudging” part. Take your finished rice and add it in to the tomato, sausage, pepper mixture until you think the balance is right. This is up entirely to you and just keep some thought to the proportion you want to have when you start eating it and how much rice you really want in there. I settled with something that looked like this:
Ultimately, this is what I ended up w/ on the plate:
Now, I had a LOT of leftover rice, I had made 4 servings of rice but I’d estimate I only used about half of it in the final product. This is fine because otherwise I feel like the ratio of “filler” (the rice) to “killer” (delicious sausage and peppers) would have been off and made each serving a little bit less potent.
Overall this is a very easy, fairly quick and simple thing to make on a week night for a filling and satisfying dinner. I ended up getting 5 servings all weighing in at approximately 285 grams a piece, or, 10.5 ounces each.
I travel for work very often now and as such my grocery shopping habits have changed dramataically. In the past I was always one for fresh stuff ready to go, but now I often times come home to nothing in the fridge and need food I can heat and eat quickly. Since things go bad I can’t keep as much stuff to “throw together” on hand. This will freeze nicely and create a decent amount of portable lunch leftovers so this kind of food is something I’m doing with increased frequency lately.
Speaking of increased frequency, you’re probably wondering if this will be some flash in the pan (IT’S A COOKING PUN) or if there will really continue to be more updates to this space now. Ultimately, my goal is to now add some new content a few times a month (we’re a far cry away from the daily updates I was doing back in my prime) but hopefully this continues to evolve. Once the summer begins I will be doing one post a month with ingredients procured entirely from the farmers market in my neighborhood each week.
While this recipe and meal isn’t mind blowing or anything I thought back on what I did here and how it compared to where I was cooking-wise when I started. Back then I was literally baking fish sticks and putting them on a tortilla and calling that a meal. While I still do love me a ghetto fish taco, I think it’s safe to say my cooking game has vastly improved since then. I essentially just looked at my available ingredients and threw this together without any kind of recipe, which, to me at least, is a more pure form of cooking than me googling a recipe or something like that.
Stay tuned, I’m sure some new, not all that interesting take on a hot dog is coming before you know it.
Seth's Fridge 