"Jamaella"

Help.  I have fallen into a cooking black hole and all the creativeness of cooking is being sucked out of me.  I figured that I've cooked roughly 10,000 or more dinners in my lifetime and all I can say is that's a lot of cookin'.  Lately, I've been cooking the same old tired dishes over and over and they just don't taste so good anymore. Did I lose my touch for cooking?And what was I going to make for dinner when what I had on hand was shrimp and some Andouille sausage that I had purchased on a whim?  I began to think about when I was younger, and all the meals that I received compliments on, like those dishes that took me back to my English and Italian roots, or new meals I tried after watching a favorite television cook.  As I reminisced with my laptop in front of me, I thought about those pioneer television chefs like Julia Child, Martin Yan and Justin Wilson.

Justin Wilson...

When my husband and I were first married we used to watch Justin's cooking show and loved listening to his humorous anecdotes about Louisiana Cajun life.  We loved his thick Cajun accent and his catchphrases like "How Y'all Are"?  and "I gar on tee."  He was a modern renaissance man, a cook, engineer, politician, humorist, and a song writer.  I found his jambalaya recipe online and spent the rest of the afternoon watching excerpts from his show on YouTube.  By the time I had finished amusing myself, I realized that is it was too late to go to the grocery store to purchase some of the ingredients that I didn't have on hand before my husband came home.  I realized I had to make some substitutions to the dish.  The biggest substitution would be omitting green peppers.  My husband hates green peppers and he can taste even the smallest piece of diced pepper in a dish.  I ended up substituting with okra instead.  He likes okra which many people dislike, but won't eat green peppers, go figure.

What I ended up with, was a very different recipe.

• Onions, raw, 1 cup, chopped 
• 1 cup of sliced okra
• Garlic, 4 cloves , chopped 
• 6 green onions, sliced
• Canola Oil, 3 tbsp 
• Petite cut diced tomatoes, 28 oz can
• 6 cups Chicken Broth, 
• 1/2 lb. sliced Andouille sausage, browned and cooked
• 1 to 1 1/2 lb. shrimp, peeled and deveined
• Parsley, dried, 2 tbsp 
• Tabasco Sauce, 2 tsp 
• 1/4 cup Andrea's Steak sauce
• Thyme, ground, 3 tsp 
• 4 cup of white rice (I used short grain)

Directions

Saute: onion, in 3 Tbl. canola or peanut oil until soft.  Add garlic and stir one minute.
Add: tomatoes, okra, green onion and chicken broth
Simmer about an hour. 

Add: sausage, shrimp and Parsley. Bring to a boil.
Add: Tabasco, Worcestershire, Thyme and 2 cups of rice.
Add 2 cups uncooked rice and stir and simmer for 25 minutes or until rice is tender.
13 - 1 cup servings

When my husband came home we ate dinner. "That's good Paella," he said.  I told him it was Jambalaya but he insisted it tasted more like Paella.  I disagreed, but dropped the subject.  The dish really didn't have much in common with paella except the short grain rice and the seafood.  So maybe we can say for my husband's sake that the dish is Jamaella.  Justin Wilson once said this about Cajun cooking, "What it is, is creating what you have to offer, putting it together using common sense, imagination, and the proper amounts, and it comes out as good food." 

That's what I did and it came out as good food.  I GAR ON TEE!

I Tried it: Dish Soap as a Bathtub Cleaner

As stated in the section about me (Nissa) I just moved into an apartment built in the 1920s, so it comes with this really great clawfoot tub. I love it, but I was so scared to clean it with any harsh chemicals, lest I burn a hole right through it! So I did a little research, and found that a lot of people with porceline finished tubs use plain old dish soap to gently, but effectively clean their antique bathtubs. I was a bit sceptical at first, and you can't believe everything you read on the internet. Why would anyone even buy a separate, and super harsh bathroom cleaner when they had perfectly good (and cheap!) dish soap in the kitchen? But, it did seem gentle enough, and what's the worst that could happen? It doesn't get my tub perfectly clean and I'll have to try something else?

Their arguments were sound enough:

1. Dish soap is made to break up grease and food build up. (Read oils and proteins, which are the scum part of soap scum)

2. No harmful chemicals/fumes= no skin irritation or need to open the window in the middle of the Boston Winter to ventilate.

3. It's very inexpensive

4. It multitasks, meaning I only have to keep one small bottle around for both dish washing, and cleaning the tub, instead of two bottles. (Hey, that matters with 400 square feet of space!)

5. I trust it to be powerful enough to clean the dishes off of which I EAT, so why would it not make my tub clean enough for me to stand in it while I shower?

So, I tried it.

Here is my tub with two weeks worth of dirt, scum from bar soap and bathrings from my olive oil enriched salt scrub.

>

And here it is after I hit it with some Palmolive antibacterial dish washing liquid:

It worked like a dream! No smell, no tough scrubbing(just the normal amount of scrubbing involved) , no peeling hands, no bleach spots on my clothes! It was just fantastic! I'll never go back! I was so happy with the results of my tub, I cleaned my sink too!

Just a word of caution: I'm sort of enamored with my gleaming bathroom now. I like to stop in every hour or so, just to look at it. Maybe you're not as weird as I am, but you have been warned.