Matt's jumbo jambalaya

After seeing Rick Stein make a rather nice looking Cajun jambalaya at the weekend I decided to take myself on a taste trip to the deep south and make one myself. Here's my recipe below - note that I had a slightly sacreligious jambalaya as I wasn't able to use the complete "holy trinity" of onions, green peppers and celery.

Ingredients

• 400g chicken breast
  
• 1 large smoked sausage
  
• 1 large onion
  
• 1 large pepper (as noted above this should be green, but I had to make do with a yellow one)
  
• 4 pieces of celery
  
• 1 green chilli pepper
  
• 2 heaped teaspoons of hot chilli powder (approximately - vary as to your liking)
  
• half a teaspoon
  
• 4 cloves of garlic
  
• 2 large tomatoes
  
• 2 large mushrooms
  
• sweetcorn
  
• 1 mug of rice
  
• 1 chicken stock cube in a pint of boiling water (or you could use proper chicken stock)
  
• oil
  

Now the majority of those ingredients were just what I decided to put into my jambalaya, but you can play around with the meat and vegetable combo of your choice (Rick Stein had fresh prawns in his as well as the sausage and chicken, which adds to the whole Creole-ness of it.)

Method
To cook this first you will need a large deep pan (generally a larger one than the one I had to use). Slice up your sausage into and place into your pan and fry in the oil for a minute or two. Dice your chicken and place into the pan and fry until it's white on the outside. Now add your chopped onion, garlic, celery and peppers and fry off for a couple of minutes. Add the rest of the vegetables and spices and again leave to cook for a couple of minutes. Add the rice into the pan and allow it to soak up some of the moisture already in the pan for a couple of minutes. Add the stock and bring to the boil. Cover and leave to simmer for about 25-30 minutes. This should be enough to serve about three people, or two if both of those people are me.