Jambalaya is just the kind of hearty dish I like. Meat, carbohydrates and veg in a spicy, tasty mix, served with a fresh baguette.

The dish is Cajun in origin and in trying to stick with it’s roots, I used Crocodile tail as one of the meats (although I suppose Alligator would have been truer to form). Jambalaya’s versatility means that you can pick and choose what meat you use, but chicken, sausage and Prawn or combinations thereof are probably the most common used. With the crocodile, I used two chorizo sausages. 

Recipes I had a look at kept mentioning the holy trinity of celery, pepper and onion, but I think adding garlic and chilli to make it a quintessential quintet is far more appropriate! I roughly chopped the meats and put them in a pan with a Tbs of groundnut oil to cook. I then roughly chopped an onion, two sticks of celery and a red pepper. Once the meats had browned a bit, I added the veg, two cloves of chopped garlic and a finely chopped fresh chilli, then cooked for about 5 more minutes.

To the mixture, you add 200g of white rice (basmati or any easy cook or long grain rice is fine) and stir into the mixture to make sure it picks up the flavour of all the ingredients, before adding a pint of stock (veg, chicken or pork can be used). This is enough for 2-3 people.

Stick the lid on the pan and cook for 15 minutes and voila, it’s ready to be served with a fresh french stick. Jambalaya is like a spicy risotto, but less starchy and probably a bit less heavy. The smoky taste of the chorizo does not dominate and the crocodile still clearly had it’s own flavour, along with the vegetables.

I have eaten crocodile once or twice before and it tasted of the rather cliched description ‘fishy chicken’. This crocodile meat was definitely more fishy in both consistency and taste and didn’t really taste anything like chicken. Maybe the different cuts of meat produce different flavours and consistencies, but I guess I’ll have to buy it a few more times to work that out.