Seafood Jambalaya
Our dinner casserole for this week is a seafood paella or jambalaya (both are a rice dish, where as gumbo is a thickened soup or stew). The recipe we used is adapted from the SparkPeople cookbook (p169) but to save time, we made a major modification: the rice was cooked separately in a rice cooker.
We used 1½ cup brown rice with 3 cups of water and 2 Tbs lemon juice. Cooking it separately cut down on the total cooking time because we were able to get it started before prepping and cooking the veggies. This recipe was an easy way to use up left over veggies from the freezer or cooked meat. We used salmon, shrimp and turkey sausage but shredded chicken would also be delicious.
The base was diced celery, onion and bell peppers and low fat turkey kielbasa (Brandt is 100 cal per 100g), which were sauteed in 1 tsp of grape seed oil. We added 2 cloves of sliced garlic, 1 tsp each of chili powder, onion powder and cumin, salt and pepper to taste, 1 cup of chicken stock and 1 jar (16oz) of diced tomatoes and let it simmer until the rice had finished cooking. Then we added a package of frozen shrimp and leftover cooked salmon that we had frozen the week before (both left out for at least 30 minutes to partially defrost) and 1 cup each of sweet peas and corn. These were heated through for about 5 minutes before serving, or until the shrimp had turned pink. It will easily serve 6-8 and is about 390 calories per heaping cup.
Each serving was ½ cup rice and a heaping cup of jambalaya/paella and a side salad of cucumber, pepper, tomato and feta sprinkled with oregano, lemon and vinegar. We stored the leftover mixture separately from the rice for two reasons. The first was so the liquid in the wouldn’t all be absorbed by the rice and turn it into mush (that happens to my stews often and Steve doesn’t like the texture) and the second was so I could portion control the amount of rice in my servings. Steve needs extra carbs so he took a larger quantity of rice.
