While living in the panhandle of Florida, we learned about red beans and rice and what a wonderful meal it can be. I've made it in the past, but always by simply using a box of Zatarain's Red Beans and Rice mix. Making it from scratch with this recipe surprised me with how many fresh vegetables went into the recipe. I thought it was going to turn out to be more like a stew but it was perfect when everything ended up cooking together in a crock pot. I ended up doubling the recipe when I made it this time but here's the list of ingredients for a single batch:
- 1 lb of dry red kidney beans
- 1 medium onion, diced
- 3 celery stalks, chopped
- 3 cloves of garlic, minced
- 1 1/4 pounds of andouille sausage, cut into thin slices
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp of black pepper
- 1 tsp of hot sauce
- 1/2 tsp dried thyme
- 2 bay leaves
- 7 cups of water
- 10 cups of cooked rice
The first thing I did was to rinse the kidney beans and put them into the crockpot. After being diced, the rest of the ingredients were all added to the crock pot (except the rice). Preparation was pretty easy, right?
As I added the water to the crock pot I realized (with the 6th cup of water reaching the top edge of the crock pot, that a doubled recipe would not fit into a single crockpot. Uh oh... Luckily I had a second crock pot handy and figured I'd just split the recipe. Dividing it up was easy enough, just scooped out half of everything and put it into the other crock pot. Once I had everything divided I was halfway successful in turning on the two crock pots.
I was happy to have started the meal early enough that we could eat at a decent time, hopefully around 4:30-5:00. To get there, the mixture needed to cook in the crockpot on high for 6 hours or low for 10 hours. I was starting the cooking at about 10:30 in the morning so using high for 6 hours would have dinner right on schedule. Well, at least that was my plan...
After getting the crock pot started I went out to run a couple of errands. When I got back home a couple of hours later I checked on things and realized that although I started crock pots right on time, I had only turned them on to the low setting. **sigh** After doing some math I computed that it had cooked for 1/3 of its time which meant I needed to to cook it for another 4 hours on high. **sigh** again. Since I figured this out at about 2:30pm it meant that dinner wouldn't be ready until about 6:30. Luckily, it turned out to be well worth the wait!
An hour before the cooking time was finished I used a potato masher to slightly mash all of the ingredients -- not enough to mash everything into a puree but just enough to break up the beans and sausage a bit. Everything was going smoothly until I went to the second crockpot... When I tried one of the beans I noticed that the bean was nowhere near as cooked as the other pots. Definitely al dente. That's when I noticed the timer on the crockpot still read 4:00 hours. Sheesh, that crockpot needed to have a start button pressed (unlike the other one which started as soon as I set the temperature).
Oh well, we were still able to have dinner on time (well, the second modified time) and the "leftover" batch would be ready a couple of hours later.
In any case, these red beans and rice were absolutely amazing!!! Definitely didn't come out of a box and I think it was better than any I've ever had before. I think this recipe is going to be one of my new favorites. No need to go back south for some good old comfort food!
Bon appetit (ya'll)!!
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