Vegetarian Cajun Jambalaya

Hello there, and Happy New Year!  One resolution I have for 2014 is to cook and post more recipes as Sally finishes up her PhD coursework and prepares for her dissertation research.  While she is enjoying her program, she has been swamped with classes and has been unable to post much recently.  Sally is definitely the chef of the house, but occasionally I can depart from my dishwashing and blog-editing duties and come up with a good dish for us to enjoy.  So here is my first kitchen effort of 2014!

Recently I have been craving some good Cajun food, but vegetarian Cajun options can be hard to find.  So I went online and found a recipe from Emeril for a Cajun vegetarian jambalaya, and made a few of my own adjustments to it.  I substituted two vegetarian sausages and a package of meatless chicken from Trader Joe’s for the squash and eggplant, and used a tablespoon each of Cajun spice mix, a red and black pepper mix, and red hot pepper flakes instead of cayenne peppers.  I also used brown rice instead of white rice, which took about 15 minutes longer to cook than Emeril’s instructions indicated.  The result was surprisingly delicious – try it for yourself and see what you think!

Vegetarian Cajun Jambalaya

Adapted from Emeril Lagasse

This recipe cooks up a LOT of jambalaya that you can eat all week – or even freeze some of it for re-discovery sometime in the future…

You can find the original recipe here.

 Tasty Easy Healthy Green Recipe Ratings:

Recipe Report Card	Notes About Recipe Ratings
Tasty Rating Five Chefs (Gourmet Fare!)	Sally was really surprised at how good this actually was, and that I didn’t screw it up. A little spicy, but not overwhelmingly so, and the meatless sausage and chicken added some great texture.
Easy Rating Four Easy Chairs (“ABC, Easy as 123…”)	Chopping everything up takes some time, but in general it is a pretty straightforward dish.
Healthy Rating Four Apples (Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise)	Brown rice and lots of vegetables makes this pretty healthy, although the salt and oil bring it down a notch.
Green Rating Three Leaves (Average Environmental Friendliness)	All of the vegetables and rice were organic, but not the protein or oil.  Unfortunately nothing was really local.