Low Bowl #36

 

I had the ingredients on hand to make farro jambalaya (recipe from My Fitness Pal), so I had that with a sort of complementary salad I made from green leaf lettuce, tomato, cucumber, red onion, avocado, Bac'n pieces, and a homemade remoulade-style dressing.

This was one of the best meals I've made in absolute ages. Of course I love farro, and I needed to use it as part of my seemingly endless pantry utilization quest. And I had some Tofurky sausages that needed using. But it would probably not typically occur to me to put farro in Cajun food. However: This was amazing and you should try it!

I've been watching a lot of PB with J lately on YouTube, and "J" (Jeremy) is always pushing people to adapt recipes for themselves. Of course I do this in a variety of ways--I veganize things, I swap in a different color of bell pepper (yellow here instead of green)--but I rarely throw in extra ingredients. This time, something about making Cajun food without including celery with the aromatics struck me as just wrong, and I had the celery, so I added that in with the onion and pepper. It's the Holy Trinity of Cajun cooking, after all. That felt necessary to me, somehow. I'm glad I followed my instincts. I don't know if it made a difference in the end, because celery isn't a very strong flavor and many of the flavors here are very strong, but the meal was delicious and adding celery boosted the veggies--and I'm always adding veggies to my meals, even if not to individual recipes. (And why not? Jeremy is really giving me permission to go wild.)

Jambalaya is one of the best-known Cajun dishes for a reason: It's wonderfully flavorful, with a delightful kick. I don't think I've ever made it from scratch, vegan or not, but I want to again now, with rice as is more traditional. Farro is excellent here, of course; I just want to try everything sometimes, I guess.

The salad was great, too, probably because it's summer and the veggies are all amazing and fresh. The remoulade dressing was just right, somehow, with it's tangy, mustardy notes. And on another note, I have recently replaced my broken salad spinner, and making salad is so much easier than it was in the long season I was attempting to pat all my lettuces dry and then setting them in my bay window on kitchen towels.

Are there other Cajun dishes you think I should try having in a vegan version? Let me know!