Lauren Does Gumbo...Sorta

So last night I was "cooking for one." We had plans to watch The Dictator with friends and because my husband gets off work quite late, he planned on going straight to the movie theatre from his office to meet me and everyone else. So after running around doing errands all day after work, I got home and realised I had about 40 minutes to cook, and eat, dinner...as well as take my Bug out ("Bug" being my dog Bugsy).

As hinted at in my previous cooking post, deep down I think I secretly thrive on the rush of doing things last minute. In college I literally crammed 26 hours worth of "life" into every day and loved every second of it (even though I would then come home during Christmas or Summer break and sleep for two weeks straight...literally). So, in the kitchen, I love having a plan, but I also love the challenge and the rush of last minute "thrown-together" meals!

I opened my fridge determined to make something tasty, easy, quick, relatively healthy, and something that would let me use up a number of random left over items we had laying about the fridge. This is what I scrounged up:

We had some left over brown rice, some turkey sausages, a jalapeno, half a red onion, roma tomatoes, green onion (from a local farm), Indian pickled garlic (I am ADDICTED to this stuff - dangerous), paprika, red chili flakes, salt and pepper. Now for whatever reason "gumbo" jumped to my mind. Now calling what I ended up making "gumbo" would probably get me slapped in New Orleans. So I'll just say instead that the "concept" of gumbo was my very broad muse.

First step was to heat up two teaspoons of EVOO over medium heat and toss in two turkey sausages that I had sliced at an angle into half inch pieces to brown. I then deseeded and finely diced the jalapeno, and medium diced about half a cup of red onion and tossed that all in.

You want to get a good brown on the sausages, so cook this for a good 3 to 5 minutes. Then I threw in the green garlic diced up (green garlic is like a hybrid of spring onions and garlic) and sauteed for another minute or two. I added a good helping of paprika, chili flakes, salt and pepper, then cranked the heat up to medium high and added two roma tomatoes roughly chopped up. You want to saute this mixture until the tomatoes start to break down and the ingredients just start to stick to the bottom of the pan.

My "gumbo" and my fancy wine bottle that I just had to show off

When the pan is nice and hot, it's time to throw in about half a cup of white wine...or a splash more, and let the heat incorporate and cook the wine down so you have a some-what-mushy consistency. Turn the heat down to medium low, add a bay leaf, or any other seasonings you think it is lacking after tasting the mixture, and let simmer for a few minutes.

All that's left to do is stir in the brown rice to heat everything up and finally...dish up!

I put a small (ish) dollop of sour cream on the top to balance out the heat that I had built and it really was delicious! This meal was so quick and easy that I had time to enjoy a glass of wine with my dinner AND there were so few dishes used to make it that after I cleaned my bowl and my glass, I cleaned the kitchen before having to walk out the door. To top it all off, there was enough left for lunch the next day...now that is a "win, win, win situation" in my books.

Thanks for reading! Do you have any favorite meal memories that have come from the "what's in the fridge" ingredients list?