Tofu Jambalaya with Mississippi Red Beans

Tonight Eric was craving creole food, so I looked up the ingredients for a tofu jambalaya and found a fabulous recipe at Fat Free Vegan. In order to make it a whole meal, I also improvised a recipe for Mississippi Red Beans. The whole meal was really easy to make, filling, and super tasty and good-smelling.

Caroline's Mississippi Red Beans

1 c. dried kidney beans (or probably 2 cans of kidney beans)
4 c. H2O (or 2 cups h2o, 2 cups veg broth)
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 onion, chopped and sauteed
1 bell pepper, chopped and sauteed
1 tsp. liquid smoke (or to taste)
2 tsp olive oil
cayenne to taste
cajun spice to taste
salt to taste

To start, I used dried kidney beans so I had to sort through them to remove any split or damaged beans. Here are my pretty red beans on a plate:

Next, I rinsed them and put them in the pressure cooker with a dash of olive oil and seasoned the water with liquid smoke, salt, bay leaves, and set it to pressure cook for 25 minutes. In the mean time, I chopped up one medium onion, one green bell pepper and 4 cloves of garlic:

Which I then sauteed until soft. As soon as it was ready, I set it aside with a lid to keep it warm and waited until the beans were done to set them aside to de-pressurize.


Next, I worked on the jambalaya. Here's the pretty lineup of the ingredients:


It was a very simple recipe which involved chopping up a giant onion, orange bell pepper, and 2 ribs of celery and then sauteeing them in a stock pot. Here's the veggies:



I added one cup of white rice (the recipe even specifies that brown rice is not very good with the jambalaya... I ALWAYS use brown rice but the white rice was the perfect texture when all was said and done) and four cloves of chopped garlic and fried the rice a little bit with the veggies. Finally, I added 2 cans of diced tomatoes, 1/2 a cup of vegetable broth, and some liquid smoke. Then I added this delicious mountain of chopped tofu:


Let this whole mixture simmer on low heat for over 30 minutes until the rice is soft. Then you get this delicious combination in my bowl, all ready to eat:


...tofu jambalaya and Mississippi red beans! It was a definite hit!