10/1/08 -- Chicken Jambalaya

I came home from work today really wiped out, the result of a late night fencing and another late night talking with my housemate. I was looking for something to make for dinner, and my other housemate (yes, we have two), told me that there was a chicken breast in the fridge that needed to be cooked up, so I started looking through my trusty old Better Homes & Gardens cookbook. On one page, there was a recipe for Chicken Jambalaya labeled "FAST!"

Ha. Maybe I'm too much a creature of the Internet Age, but I don't think of something that takes a good, solid hour to make as "fast."

It was good, though. I halved the recipe, since I had only one chicken breast, and I needed tomatoes. Housemate #2 was going to the store anyway, so she picked up some Campari tomatoes for me. I chopped up a couple, and used them in place of the canned tomatoes the recipe called for.

OK, confession time: I really like cutting and chopping. Even something as pain-in-the-elbow as tomatoes, with a really sharp knife, is just, I don't know -- satisfying -- for some reason.

Here's the question of the day -- should I have washed the rice? It came out all right, so I guess the answer is, "yes," but I have never had real jambalaya before (Zatarain's doesn't count), so I can't really be sure.

A couple of notes on the spicing:

• I didn't have any garlic salt, so I used garlic powder and added some salt. Wild guess, but it seemed to work.
• My one grumble is that it could have been hotter. Next time, I'm thinking about adding part of one of my wife's homegrown jalapenos.
  

Oh, and it looked like this: