Tuesday Dinners

Step By Step Directions

If you don’t already have any cooked rice then now is the time to make it, you can do your chopping while it’s cooking. (I’m making a double batch)

Now it’s time to chop all the vegetables. Remember that the smaller your dicing the more consistent the taste is going to be. So in this case you want to chop everything to about the size of the ground beef and rice. But… if you don’t have time for that just chop it up and make it about even.

The “Holy Trinity” of Cajun cooking is made up of equal parts celery, white onion and green bell peppers. You can use other types of peppers than green but you will more than likely be called a fraud online and by any Southerner that happens to be in your kitchen.

But sometimes the store is out of green bell peppers so you hope you don’t get crucified on the Internet.

Once that’s done we want to start to brown our meat. I set my stove to medium and then made sure to break up all the pieces as small as you can.

Once the meat is mostly cooked through you’ll want to add in all your chopped vegetables. Don’t drain the liquid from the meat, we need it to give us our color later.

Now we want to add in all of our spices. If you have Cajun or Creole seasoning feel free to add that, otherwise you can add in the spice mixture from above. I put the spices as a general guideline but this is truly food you should cook with your soul, do what you think tastes good.

Liquid management is important for this recipe, we don’t want it to be so dry that our flour has nothing to condense and we don’t want it so wet that our rice is swimming. I tend to add a cup of water at this point knowing it’s easier to add more flour later if we need to.

I like to add hot sauce instead of cayenne, it helps with the liquid management and can give us an extra kick if it’s extra hot sauce.

Now we want to add in our flour (cornstarch would also work). The goal is to create something that is thicker than water, but still a liquid. We’re not making a roux, just thickening the water in the pot.

After all of those ingredients have married together we should have the following:

• Meat fully cooked
• Vegetables no longer crisp/crunchy
• Spices incorporated into the entire dish
• No standing liquid, it should be stuck the nearest non-liquid

It’s time to add our rice. Now, you may be like me and think that it won’t all fit into the pot, but it will (probably). The rice is great about fitting into the other crevices left by our lazy chopping.

You’ll want to mix everything together and the rice should begin to take on a brown color. This is why it’s called “dirty” rice. The final color is dependent on what ingredients you used where. If you used the chicken livers that this recipe has historically been made with you’ll be able to achieve a nice rich brown, if you used ground beef it’s likely going to be closer to white than brown.

Let everything marinate and cook down until you’re happy with the color and texture of the ingredients and then serve.

Enjoy.

Variations

• Original “dirty” rice is made with minced chicken livers, this really gives it the brown color it’s known for
• You can use sausage instead of ground beef, Andouille or otherwise it’s up to you
• Change up your spices, if you want more heat then bring it on, if you just want to use a store bought blend of spices then feel free
• Cook your rice in a little bit of oil before adding, it crisps it up and helps with the coloring

Unsolicited Feedback

• BB: This ain’t like my mama makes.
• PE: Why not just make gumbo, or jambalaya, or etouffe?
• PL: Beats just plain chicken and rice.