ROUSES_MarApr2019_Magazine-R

Once the vegetables are nice and caramelized, begin to reintroduce your meats into the dish. Next, slowly add chicken stock — about three-and-a-half cups of chicken stock per pound of pasta you plan to cook. Again, scrape the bottom of the pot to loosen anything stuck there. If you hate your friends and wish to make red pastalaya, it’s the same prep, only refrain from cooking your vege- tables down as much as you did for the brown variation. You’re aiming here only to get your onions translucent and bell peppers soft. Then add diced tomatoes and the juice from said tomatoes. The tomato juice will cause the reddening of the dish, and will cut the necessary amount of chicken stock down to three cups. In both cases, once the stock is added, get it to a simmer and add your dry pasta, making sure that it is completely submerged in the liquid. Put a lid on the pot and stick it in the oven. Bake one hour at 350 degrees. If everything goes right, the pastalaya you pull from the oven will save your marriage, improve your personal hygiene, give you a whiter smile, and add five hundred points to your Good Place score. But what if something goes wrong? Don’t worry; you’ve got options. First: Be aware that it’s the chicken stock that’s going to get you — adding too much or not enough. “If you realize you didn’t add enough,” says Ardoin, “be sure to heat the liquid separately before adding it to the pot.” Other- wise, the entire dish will have to reheat in the oven, and will do so unevenly. If you have a bad feeling about things and want to check, remove the pot from the oven, set it on the stove, close the oven door, check the pastalaya, correct your mistakes and then put it back in the oven. The worst thing you can do is keep the oven door open while inspecting your dish because the heat will escape. (This goes for anything that you’re baking, from bread to prime rib. Temperature variation in the oven will absolutely destroy your dish.) If you pull your pot out of the oven and discover in horror that the bottom is burned, don’t panic. Yet. Find a casserole dish, and transfer everything into it. DO NOT SCRAPE THE BOTTOM OF THE POT. “Use your spoon and lightly move the ingredients around,” Ardoin explains. “Whatever comes off, comes off.” When you’re preparing a jambalaya and the rice sticks to the bottom of the pot, there’s no mistaking the disaster unfolding. Pastalaya, however, is a bit more compli- cated than that. “Sometimes it’s not burned; sometimes it’s just stuck, and the caramelization will add a little extra flavor. There is a big difference between burned and crispy,” cautions Ardoin. Conversely, if you pull the dish from the oven and notice that it has a lot of mois- ture to it, that is likely a good thing. You don’t want a completely dry pastalaya. The most important thing to remember when making a pastalaya is that there is no “right” way to do it. Ask 10,000 people how to make gumbo or jambalaya, and you’ll get 10,000 different responses. Every oven is different. Every pot is different. Every recipe is differ- ent in seasoning and quantity of vegetables. It’s about trial and error. Pastalaya is a dish where fortune favors the bold.

EVERYDAY

59 WWW.ROUSES.COM photo by Romney Caruso