Kestrell

I finally transcribed this though, like New Orleans music, there's a lot of room for improvising.

Notes:

The best thing about New Orleans food is that it is very conducive to being tweaked to suit your personal tastes.
For example, I don't like green peppers, but I love sweet red peppers, so that's the kind of pepper I use.

The secret ingredient to this recipe is you should play whatever music makes you happy, although preferably it should be New Orleans music.
WWOZ, New Orleans jazz and blues station, is broadcast at WWOZ.org, and you can also get it through Alexa or any other smart speaker service.

Ingredients

The Holy Trinity:
one pepper (I use a red pepper)
one onion (I use a Vidalia onion or other sweet onion)
a couple of stalks of celery

You can also include some garlic, referred to as "The Pope"

Uncle Ben's Converted White Rice (Food snobs will think this is a mistake, but it's actually what a lot of traditional recipes call for, because the rice is just a sop to hold all the flavors)
V8 juice, Bloody Mary mix, chicken broth, used instead of water for the rice
Andouille sausage or spicy kielbasa-style sausage if you can't find andouille
Sometimes I also throw in some sweet, not hot, Italian sausage (The idea that New Orleans food is especially hot is a myth: what you're aiming for is a blend of flavors, not one dominant flavor.)
Thick-cut bacon or fatty piece of pork (this will make the rice have a creamy texture)
You can add or substitute whatever you like: diced chicken, shrimp or crayfish...As the chef who taught the class I took at the New Orleans School of Cooking said, Look in your fridge, your backyard, your neighbor's fridge, your neighbor's back yard...
Tabasco or other kind of red pepper hot sauce

I use a rice cooker, which is totally traditional for New Orleanians, but you can also just throw everything in a big pot to finish cooking.

First, turn on your music and get out your good knife.

Throw a couple of cups of rice into your rice cooker and add twice the amount of liquid, such as V8 juice or Bloody Mary mix, anything but water (again, I've seen these ingredients listed in a number of cookbooks, so I'm not lying when I say it's traditional)
Give the rice a stir so it doesn't clump.
Add salt, pepper, and some Tabasco or other kind of hot sauce to the rice.

Get out a big saute pan and put a little bit of olive oil or butter in it.
(True fact: when Alexx and I were in New Orleans, the cab driver who was driving us back to the airport kept giving us his favorite recipes, and every one began with "You take a stick of butter...")
except for a dessert recipe, which began with "You take two sticks of butter..."

Dice your vegetables, and don't skimp--these are going to add a significant amount of the flavor.
Place the vegetables in the saute pan and keep cooking them until the vegetables are limp and the onion is translucent and sweet.
Don't rush this step, just turn up the music and bop around a bit, stirring the vegetables every once in a while so they don't burn.

Toss the sauteed vegetables in the rice cooker.

Slice the sausage into pieces approximately a half-inch or so thick, in other words, bite-sized.
Brown the sausage in the saute pan and then toss that into the rice cooker.
Cook the one-inch-one and a half inch pieces of bacon and, when crispy, place on plate lined with paper towels to drain off some of the fat, then place the bacon into the rice cooker.
If you want to add anything else, like chicken or shellfish, add that.

Close the lid of your rice cooker and start it.
One of the great things about using the rice cooker is that you can leave the jambalaya to sit a little longer after it's finished, and it will just get better.
Note: Jambalaya is one of those dishes that is even better the second day. This is such a true fact that I usually plan on making the jambalaya the day before Mardi Gras, and this also leaves me less to do on Mardi Gras.

Check your rice cooker for times, but I usually let the jambalaya sit in the cooker for an hour or so from the time I start it. Give it a few good stirs to mix up the ingredients before serving.

You can put out a bottle or two of hot sauces for people who like their food a little spicier. I like to also have some cornbread and some peach-flavorred sweet tea, like Snapple, or hurricanes if you want something alcoholic.

Our hurricane recipe

At some point, someone accidentally inverted the amounts of passionfruit syrup and pomegranate juice in this recipe, and we decided that we liked it even better, because it isn't as sweet as the original recipe.

Original amount: 3 oz Passion Fruit syrup, also called nectar, and available from Amazon
Our adaptation: 1 1/2 oz. passionafruit syrup (this stuff is really sweet)
1/2 oz. lemon juice (half of a lemon), preferably squeezed yourself, but the stuff from the plastic lemons is acceptable, but try to get the kind that is *not* from concentrate
1 oz. simple syrup (if you buy it already prepared, avoid brands that use corn syrup)
Original recipe: 1/2 oz. pomegranate juice
Our adaptation: 3 oz. pomegranate juice
2 oz. Bacardi gold rum

Serve over ice, preferably in hurricane glasses (we have plastic ones in Mardi Gras colors--purple, green, and gold--that we bought on Amazon)
Note: this recipe is so good that we make both alcoholic and virgin versions, and it all gets consumed.