Awhile back, I asked my mother for some of the recipes she made when I was younger; she CAN cook, but didn’t much care to for just two people after my father left, and I wanted to make sure that some of the things she used to make would be preserved. Having done so, I promptly filed the recipes and largely left them alone, not because I didn’t want to eat any of them, but due to a combination of my not being such a great cook myself and the most doable of them relying on an ingredient I can’t get. (Fresh shell-on shrimp.)
Now that I’m making a project out of improving my own skills, it makes sense to revisit these recipes. I picked one that Mom always made for holiday dinners like Thanksgiving and Christmas; it was a surprise to me to discover that not only do most American families not eat dirty rice on holidays, it’s actually highly specific to the central Louisiana region Mom grew up in. I didn’t think much of it as a kid, but then my palate was pretty limited at the time to “things that taste much like things I eat regularly”, as it tends to be with kids. So I decided to dust off the recipe and have a crack at it.
Transcribed from Mom’s notes, the recipe:
Tish’s Dirty Rice Dressing
1 container chicken livers (8-10 livers)
1/2 lb hot, ground sausage
1 large onion, minced
1/2 large bell pepper, minced
1 tsp celery seeds
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 tsp red pepper (optional)
1-2 tsps salt
1/2 tsp dried thyme
2 cups uncooked brown rice
1/4 cup chopped parsley
Boil livers until done. Remove livers and set aside to cool. Add to the remaining liquid enough water to make 2.5 cups of stock. Add the rice, bring to a boil, and then simmer covered for half an hour. Meanwhile, pan-fry the sausage until brown, breaking it into small pieces. Stir fry the onion, garlic, bell pepper, and celery seeds for 7 minutes. Chop the livers finely and add them and all remaining ingredients to the rice and cook on low for 6-7 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste. It should be mildly spicy and very salty. Cover and refrigerate 12-24 hours to let the seasonings blend and mellow. Heat at 350 degrees in an oven for half an hour before serving.
Looking over the ingredients, I decided to throw out the green bell pepper. I’ve managed to largely cure myself of my screaming aversion to them, and they no longer ruin a dish for me, but I’m still not fond of them in and of themselves, so out they go if I’m making this for me. I also decided that, since I’m no longer a spice-aversive little wuss, I’d swap out the small amount of red pepper (heat only) for some good New Mexican chile powder (heat and flavor). So this is now more of a New-Mex-Cajun dish. I also have no idea how many livers actually went into the dish, since all I did was buy a container of them and didn’t bother to count. On with the cooking!
1. “Cook until done”? Seriously? Time to hit Google. Search “how long to cook chicken livers”. Get lots of results regarding giving them a quick fry in bacon grease. Contemplate how good that sounds and consider drastically changing the plan. But, no; reading the recipe, we need the liquid we’re going to be boiling the chicken livers in as a rough and ready stock to cook the rice in. Google “chicken livers dirty rice” and go with a general estimate of half an hour. Write the revision into your handwritten version.
2. Marshal your cast of characters. Livers, sausage, onion, garlic, brown rice… now put Benny Hill’s “Yakety Sax” on your MP3 player while you play yet another round of Seasoning Scavenger Hunt. Naturally, your spouse will have chosen the most obscure cabinet with the most things out of your visual range to stick the celery seed, and that is of course where the chile powder always lives.
3. Ponder the direction “add to the remaining liquid enough water to make 2.5 cups of stock”. Reason that some of the liquid must boil off over the course of half an hour, and there is no practical way to measure the remaining liquid without needlessly dirtying a measuring cup. Draw up 2.5 cups of water and eyeball the water level in your chosen pot.
4. Remove your livers from the fridge. (Note: this action will cause Kitchen Bitch to dematerialize from wherever she is in the house and rematerialize in the center of the kitchen.) Carefully remove the lid and contemplate the contents. Since the directions don’t include “add the liquid” or a more frank “add a bunch of blood and dubious fluids”, use a fork to carefully transfer each of the livers from container to pot, saving the odd bits and pieces for Kitchen Bitch, who hasn’t been getting much in the way of scraps lately. Studiously eyeball the new water level. Throw the container in the outside trash where the dogs can’t get at it.
5. Turn the heat to high until you get a good boil going, then back the heat back down to medium high. Since not losing much if any water would make things easier, cover the pan and set your kitchen timer. Time to disassemble the vegetables.
6. Cut the top and bottom from your onion, then pause and stare at it for a bit. Go confirm with your spouse that there is nothing wrong with an onion whose juices run milky white instead of clear. Go back and try to put it out of your mind that it looks very much like the onion is secreting a certain fluid associated with human reproduction. Be sure to toss an eye toward the stove on your path.
7. HOLY CRAP THAT’S A LOT OF FOAMY LIVER JUICE. Back the heat down to medium from medium high and remove the cover, just in case that contributed rather than the higher heat alone.
8. Continue carefully taking apart the onion. Since the initial cuts gave you a hint that this is another weaponized onion as well as a vaguely obscene one, stand well back and go slowly with a good sharp knife. Putting this thing in the food processor would probably attract the attentions of Homeland Security. Reduce your usually frenetic onion-chopping pace to a stately one suitable for a waltz beat. Take a few breaks when your mucuous membranes get close to being overwhelmed. Transfer the onions to a bowl and wash the knife and board mostly clean of the dangerous juices.
9. Select as many garlic cloves as you damn well please and whack them with the flat side of your blade to get them out of their paper. Mince. There’s not really a lot to this process these days. By this point, given the pace imposed by the onion, your livers should be done cooking.
10. …Yuck. The foamup created a really unappealing green scum. Resolve to see if you can’t clean the livers up a bit when you chop them and transfer to a bowl, using a spider to skim off the worst of the scum, then move the livers.
11. Eyeball the pot and pour in enough water to reach what looks like the first watermark created during the first stage of cooking. Measure out two cups of rice, pour into the “stock”, and resume the high-boil-medium pattern.
12. Haul out a skillet, then grab the one-pound package of hot sausage out of the fridge. Snip off the end and squeeze at roughly the halfway point; once enough has squeezed forward of your pinching point, twist the package up to force the first half out and keep the rest firmly in. Best done over the skillet.
13. Kick the heat up to medium-high and choose an implement to break the sausage into small pieces as it cooks. Discover that using your barbecue fork, if that is your implement of choice, is only a good idea after the sausage has cooked enough not to pack firmly between the tines. Cook until everything is pretty much browned and more or less in small pieces.
14. Discover that two is an insufficient number of hands to gracefully transfer greasy bits of sausage from a greasy pan into a smallish bowl. Snap off the burner while you ponder what to do. Improvise with a balance point created by the middle spine of the kitchen sink and a towel under the handle. At least the dogs will be grateful for the strays.
15. Replace the pan on the burner and restore the heat. Dump in the onions and garlic and spread them evenly, then apply the celery seed and sautee in the fat left from the sausage. As you work on keeping everything evenly distributed, wonder in a vague sort of way why it seems like a lot longer than four minutes you observed left remaining on the timer when you put the vegetables to heat. At some point it will dawn on you that you never started a new timer for the rice, and the “four minutes and ten seconds” you saw left on the microwave display was actually the time. Fortunately, onions and garlic are one thing we do know how to “cook until done”, likewise rice. Cook the onions until soft and translucent, then remove from heat.
16. Return your attention to the livers. Since early experimentation reveals it’s going to take roughly ten years to wash each liver carefully enough to remove scum without it falling apart, reason that it’s called “dirty rice dressing” anyway and hope it isn’t noticeable. Chop the hell out of them, then scrape carefully from the cutting board into the pot of rice, which has absorbed all the stock and looks pretty well done. Stir in livers. Retrieve sausage and stir that in. Stir in vegetables.
17. Add the chile powder. This is pretty mild stuff and 1/4 tsp is a pretty wimpy amount. Add about a tablespoon and a half of pepper-and-salt mix. Add the thyme. Recall that you never did get around to buying fresh parsley because it always amounts to getting a small tree of which you will only use a few sprigs, and add some amount of dried chopped parsley between “none” and “1/4 cup”. Stir everything in again and cook another 6-7 minutes.
18. Cover the pot and pop into the refrigerator. Since you have now spent two hours cooking something you cannot eat until tomorrow, go out for sushi.
19. Discover that, due to your spouse making roast duck to go with your dressing, it is not possible to reheat in an oven at 350 because the one and only oven is occupied and is chugging along at 475. Swear. Improvise by spreading out the dressing in a layer in a baking dish and giving it a quick warmthrough while the duck is browning. Serve and consume.
This turned out “meh”, due to my mistakes rather than due to the recipe; between the lack of kitchen timer on the rice cooking, my being rushed to make a dinner reservation, and my not bothering to taste for doneness, the rice was undercooked and unpleasantly crunchy. No doubt the browning it got didn’t help either. We think we’ll try to salvage the rest (and there’s a lot of rest) by pouring in about a cup of chicken stock as it reheats the standard way next time. There’s nothing wrong with the flavor profile, however, and I can easily see myself making it again. I think next time I’d also add some green onion, and possibly some peas to replace the “green” role left unfilled by the absence of the green peppers.
