Jambalaya Stuffing

We've often been a bit nontraditional with Thanksgiving in the past.  In fact, one year we skipped the turkey entirely and had lasagna.  Thanksgiving dinner can be a lot of work.  When we had the lasagna I was kind of hoping we'd start a new and lasting tradition but it simply taught us that we do like the normal traditions more than we thought.  Anyway, I've never been a big fan of traditional stuffing, whether out of a box or prepared the hard way so this year, as the holiday was approaching, when I saw a recipe for Jambalaya Stuffing I saved it and talked Brombeere into letting me make it.

So I checked the recipe and did some shopping.  Brombeere is a better shopper than I am.  I forgot to check to see what we already had so I ended up getting a few things I didn't need to and didn't get the rice, which we were short on - not quite enough for what the recipe called for.  But after a quick trip to the store Thanksgiving morning (the store wasn't as crowded as I had expected) I had everything and was ready to start.

So I spent a bit of time chopping up veggies and the sausage, getting everything ready to start cooking.

Then it was to the stove and things started to get hot.  I will readily admit I'm not the most careful cook to ever grace a kitchen.  I can sometimes get sloppy about the order I add things together, despite what the recipe says.  As it turned out, even though I fell down a bit on that this time as well, I don't think it hurt anything.

So I cooked the sausage and then added all the veggies and spices.  The store didn't have all the spices called for so I had to improvise a little.  And I was amazed at how expensive spices can be.  Four and five dollars for those little bottles.  Oh, well.

The cooking time was a little longer for this dish but I think it was worth it. The total cooking time was somewhere around 45 minutes to an hour.

Finally everything that needed to be cooked was in the pot and cooked.  Last I added the meat.  It was at this point that I discovered I should have held out the scallions and added them at this point.  Instead I had thrown them in with all the other veggies so they got cooked..  While it didn't ruin the dish I do think they would have been better if I'd held them out.  But in the end it looked good and tasted even better!  Didn't resemble traditional stuffing very much but it was sure good jambalaya! And I really like it.