let's jazz up some pigs in a blanket

What’s new? A lot, I guess. Jesse and I hosted a holiday party on Saturday. (More on that later.) We celebrated our first anniversary on Sunday by not leaving the house and watching at least six hours of “Slow Horses,” my newest TV obsession. I’ve baked 10 German chocolate pound cakes and still feel like there’s an insurmountable quantity of holiday baking ahead of me. Oh, and after nearly two years of owning my Breville espresso machine, I’ve finally mastered it.

my cat wants a latte

… the duck jambalaya from “Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou.” Jambalaya is the pinnacle of all rice-based foods. It’s spicy! It’s meaty! It’s comforting! It’s almost gluttonous, but not quite!

It also comes in so, so many forms. At the most basic level, jambalaya is broken into two families: red (Creole, with tomatoes) and brown (Cajun, tomato-free). I grew up eating Creole jambalaya, but I now know that Cajun is 100 percent the way to go. I’m of the opinion that the tomatoes in red jambalaya can overpower the other flavors, whereas in brown jambalaya, you fully taste all the ingredients that have been caramelizing in some cases for hours.

jambalaya for days

Enter duck. Duck is a perfect base for Cajun cooking, and it was also a perfect solution for me last weekend, when I wanted to do a fair amount of cooking the night before I hosted a holiday party — while still feigning some level of elegant preparation. So I braised a whole bunch of duck legs, picked the meat and set it aside — which made this jambalaya easy in addition to being downright mouthwatering.

… andouille sausage mini pigs in a blanket. The summer I graduated from high school, while on the graduation party circuit, I noticed that everyone — my mother included — was serving these mini pigs in a blanket from Sam’s Club. They were a one-bite affair. You could eat them like popcorn. They would’ve been a problem if I hadn’t had the metabolism of a hummingbird on cocaine.