Weeknight Jambalaya

I taught this recipe at a recent webinar entitled “Healthy Eating for Busy People.” This topic is always a potential set-up because what I consider to be a “quick & easy” recipe may seem laborious and time-consuming to another person.

I assure you, however, that even a novice cook with an Instant Pot and a sharp paring knife can throw this meal together with minimal effort, which is why it’s perfect for those weeknights when you’re tired and fed-up and all you want to do is curl up on your couch — ideally after downing a bowl of deeply nourishing comfort food (such as this meal).

As I explained at the webinar, this recipe makes use of several time-saving hacks I have developed over the years:

• It is a one-pot meal, which means you don’t have to juggle a skillet and one or two separate pots (while supervising your kids’ homework and unloading the dishwasher). One-pot meals also mean minimal clean-up — great news for the human dish-washer in your home.
• It’s cooked under pressure, which can be 3-4 times faster than cooking the same meal in a stove-top casserole. Pressure cooking also preserves nutrients better than other cooking methods, and intensifies the flavors of anything you cook in it. You don’t need an Instant Pot — even an old-fashioned stove-top pressure cooker will work, though what I like about the IP is that you can wander off and bathe your kids, make a call, or do whatever else you need to do on busy weeknights while the pot cooks your dinner, requiring zero supervision. (Very helpfully, it will even turn itself off automatically if it senses that the food is beginning to stick to the bottom, preventing serious burning. Alas, conventional pressure cookers do not do that, as I have learned the hard way.)
• This dish comprises lots of ready-to-use ingredients that require very little prep (and that you can always keep a basic stock of in your freezer, fridge, and pantry), such as cooked, smoked chicken sausage, peeled shrimp, and store-bought chicken bone broth. The only prep I do is chopping onions, garlic, peppers, and celery, though if you’re really starved for time, you can even buy these ready-prepped, fresh, or frozen.
• You can prep while you cook; I generally don’t like posting separate “prep time” and “cooking time” estimates in my recipes because I usually do both at the same time. For instance, here, I chop the onion, jalapeno, and celery while the andouille slices are cooking. Once I have added the onions, celery & jalapeno to the andouille — and while these are sauteeing together — I chop the peppers and garlic. Once I have added these, I add seasonings, measure out the chicken bone broth and add it along with the rice; etc. In total, you can expect to spend about 15 minutes chopping and sauteeing ingredients until you are ready to lock the lid; at that point, you can twiddle your thumbs until the cooking time (another 15 minutes total) is up. And if you are a slow chopper, ask a family member to help you prep the ingredients to speed things up.

One more thought: many “meals in minutes” recipes you see on the internet or in cooking magazines are based around refined carbs like pasta, bread, or pizza and contain little in the way of protein or vegetables since these tend to take longer to cook. With this recipe, I hope to show that you can make a perfectly balanced, deeply nutritious meal in roughly the same time. One serving of this speedy jambalaya supplies 30-ish grams of high-quality protein, a wide range of antioxidant and anti-inflammatory vegetables, herbs & spices, healthy fats, and low-glycemic, prebiotic parboiled rice (and not much of it, either, making this a lowish-carb rice dish). What’s not to like?