One-Pot Wonder

We did make this once last year, and it was so good! We had some left over sausage and fish, and thought we'd give it a try again. Alas, again I forgot to take a picture! At this point, I'm going for 1 for 5 on the picture... but I digress. The first time we made this meal, we saw Rachael Ray make it on her show on Food Network and improvised based on what we saw, but this time I went by the recipe. Since the recipe is available online, I will just add some pointers and things I did differently.

Sausage and Fish One-Pot

For Rachael Ray's 30-minute meals, I find that they always take me longer or stress me out because I'm trying to take only 30 minutes. So, I try to pre-chop as much as I can; I would recommend starting by chopping anything which needs to be chopped.

Ingredients I used or changed:

I swapped mild italian sausage for hot because that's what I had; in retrospect, I could have thrown in some crushed red pepper to make up for the lost heat. Perhaps next time...

I used larger red potatoes.

I probably used 3/4 cup instead of 1/2 of Meridian Chardonnay (reminds me of home - SLO).

We had cod in our freezer, so that was the fish of choice.

I think I followed the directions pretty much spot on. We didn't have bread this time around, and I did miss it as an extra utensil for scooping things on to my fork, but didn't miss the starch. I would recommend sourdough if you decide to go for bread.

The absolute best part of the meal? One pot!!

Chicken Biryani, Take Two

While we've made this recipe of Chicken Biryani more than a few times (it's so easy and it only takes one pot!), this is only the second time I've blogged about it, AND this time we actually used the precise ingredients the recipe called for. In the past we've used regular raisin (in lieu of the golden) and substituted an extra cinnamon stick for the cardamom. The result of using cardamom pods and golden raisins was phenomenal! The golden raisins are much more subtle than regular, and they're the same color as the rest of the dish! The cardamom brings a unique flavor and takes away some of the sweetness that the extra cinnamon added before. With it, we drank a bottle of Cristalino Cava Brut. It balanced the spices of the dish wonderfully, and the bubbles are a nice palate cleanser!