Yesterday, I made red beans and rice starting with the recipe at:
I modified the ingredients too much for it to be practical to not just list them, but I'll find some other way of making you give traffic to the recipe above (namely cook times and temperatures). I used:
½ pound dried red beans, soaked overnight
4 cups water
4 teaspoons chicken bullion
½ pound andouille sausage, sliced into rounds
1 medium sweet onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, chopped
½ teaspoon ground black pepper
½ teaspoon Creole seasoning
a bit less than 2 teaspoons dried basil
2 cups cooked rice
This is kinda like a halving of the recipe. I didn't use the ham hock because there really isn't space in my slow cooker. The bell pepper could also cause space problems, but I also don't really like them and didn't have one when I started cooking. I also didn't add the optional jalapeno. I also don't have fresh basil, and based on online searches, this amount of dried is roughly the equivalent to (or maybe a bit extra than) the amount of fresh for a half portion. The reduction in the amount of water is recommend by several people in the comments. I believe that I got the idea for using chicken broth the same way, but this is the second time I've made this and I don't really remember. The comments include other suggestions as well and are worth looking over.
So I placed the beans, water, and chicken bullion in the crock pot. I then heated the sausage as described. I then realized that I hadn't really prepared much, so after moving the sausage to the crock pot, I turned off the burner. I then cut up the garlic and onion, turned the skillet back on, and heated until browned. The skillet had retained enough heat to start to brown the onions without me turning on the heat, which was kinda interesting. While heating I added the spices to the crock pot. I then transferred the garlic and onions to the crock pot. This was made difficult by the fact that my skillet is cast iron and large and I have trouble supporting it one handed. Thus I used two hands to hold the skillet and shook in most of the garlic and onions before fishing out the rest with a spatula. I stirred the mixture so that the spices weren't just floating on top (although they were all on top at the end anyway) then covered the crock pot and cooked as specified.
When this was about forty minutes from done, I added rice and water into my small rice cooker to make the four cups of rice. It finished with 10 minutes to go, so I let it sit on the warm setting. When the red beans and rice was supposed to be done, I opened it and it was a bit more liquidly than I wanted. I added the two cups of rice and then let it keep heating uncovered for about 5 minutes. Adding the rice nearly filled my slow cooker (1-2mm from the brim of 2 quart crock pot) so it is definitely good that I didn't use all the ingredients. I then stirred well and served.
The last time I made this the spices were on the strong side for the first serving. This time they weren't. I'm guessing that this was because of the stirring, so this supports my floating spices causing the problem. Depending on the level of spice in the later bowls, I might increase the amounts in the future. I also like the idea of adding more sausage for the amount of everything else, however I don't think it is really feasible with the size of my slow cooker. It might work if I combined the rice and beans in a larger container, but I probably won't actually do this.
When I was done eating I let everything cook for a while, then divided into two portions. One went into the fridge for dinners later this week, the other into the freezer for a bit later. The extra 2 cups of rice went into the fridge to make fried rice for lunches this week.
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