Low Country Soup

One of my favorite things ever is a Low Country Boil.  It brings back so many memories of the beach and being with family.  I find myself craving it from time to time but it's not something you would just whip up on any given day.  If you're not familiar with a Low Country Boil, it's just seafood, potatoes, sausage and corn boiled together in a big pot.  When it's done, you lay newspaper on a table and pour everything out.  Everyone stands around and eats.  No utensils required.  It's great!  This is something we would do a lot at our beach house, Windy Point.  It doesn't get much better than digging for your own clams.  We had a really unusually cold first day of November and I wanted to make a big pot of soup.  When I started thinking about what I wanted to make, all of the ingredients from a boil came to mind.  So I thought, why not make a soup with all the things I love about a low country boil?  What could be better! Here's what I came up with:

Baked Jambalaya

Jambalaya is up there with my top 5 favorite foods.  I love one pot meals and meals that you can eat for a week.  When I was in culinary school, I would make a huge pot of jambalaya and eat on it for at least 5 days!  I was really in the mood for some kind of casserole, and then I thought about jambalaya.  So I thought, what if I made jambalaya but baked it like a casserole?  The result?  Super creamy and delicious jambalaya.  You can definitely still make this recipe on the stove top, but something about baking it really brings out the starches in the rice and makes it extra creamy.  Put on your fat pants for this one, because there is nothing low calorie about this recipe!  Maybe that's what makes it so good!

Breakfast Frittata

It's been another busy weekend. Drew's dad has been visiting so I've been cooking a lot of things for breakfast. I wanted to come up with a recipe where I could feed a lot of people without using a ton of dishes and ingredients. So I thought a frittata would be perfect. A frittata is an egg based dish that's similar to a quiche or an omelet but has a lot of other ingredients inside.  Everything is cooked in one pan, it's inexpensive, feeds a crowd and is easy to make.