Audra Lowe: Today, we’re giving you what else but some good old New Orleans flavor. It always makes me so hungry. Executive Chef Matt Murphy’s M Bistro. It’s located in the fabulous Ritz-Carlton. It’s always packed and there is a good reason for that. He has a particular philosophy when it comes to preparing a meal and he calls it “Keeping It Local.” He’s all about going from farm to table and better get to tag along with Matt and Restaurant Chef Bradley McKee to the Framer’s market and then back to the kitchen for a little Creole Cooking Homemade Jambalaya. Take a look.

Matt Murphy: Hey, good morning. It’s Saturday morning here. We’re at the Carson City Farmer’s Market and I don’t really know what we’re doing right now but we’re going to get the freshest vegetables and ingredients and then we’re just going to create something. So, it’s going to be a bit of fun for us this morning, all right?

When you see this Red Oak, absolutely lovely Red Oak, did you see the leaves are bouncy, they got plenty of volume in them. It’s crisp that you’re gonna break that and you’ll see, it’ll just break, see that? It’s not bending. How do they cultivate them in?

Male: They’re cultivating them in soil sawdust compound.

Matt Murphy: Yeah.

Male: It’s a saw dust older chips.

Matt Murphy: How are you?

Female: Just fine. How are you doing?

Matt Murphy: Doing good.

Female: You frozen?

Matt Murphy: I’m a little bit frozen. Not as frozen as those shrimps looking at the icy water. Wow, when were these cut?

Female: Over the last three days.

Matt Murphy: Over the last three days. How can you get, can’t get any more fresher than that, right? I’ll trigger the trade, we can make phenomenal sausage out of the heads on the shrimp but—can we get about five pound of that?

This is Brad here and we’re using this rice in the restaurant quite a bit so it just comes out naturally. We cut it with the brown Jasmine that we plant.

Male: Come April, we’ll have about, oh, I would say 15 different varieties of heirloom tomatoes.

Matt Murphy: You know what? We’re going to take some of the broccoli. We’re probably going to clean out of everything you got left.

Male: You’re welcome.

Matt Murphy: So now, we’re ready to go back to the kitchen. We got a trunk full of food and we’re going to have some fun cooking it all up.

Again, what we’re going to do is the famous dish New Orleans Jambalaya. Origins are kinda from the Spanish word Paella. Paella is like a rice dish with seafood overcooked. What we’re doing is we’re just sweating our vegetable, put our onions in and there are celery. We call this the trinity, its onions, celery and peppers. This dish is really a fast dish to cook, its Mardi Gras right now and this dish is served at every Mardi Gras party.

The main ingredients for this are going to be shrimp, chicken and andouille. The chicken leg we got in the market, we just diced up some of the meat from one of them. We’ve got some other fresh tomatoes and then we have— what we’re using here is basically a really chunky tomato sauce. If you don’t have this at home, you can go get a can or crushed tomato, it’s very similar.

So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna take our chicken. We’re gonna put it in once that vegetables have sweated down. We call it sweating it down means that it just starts to become a little bit translucent and they release a lot of their flavors.

We have our shrimp, all going into the pot together. I have seafood and I have chicken, a little seasoning, salt, pepper and this is blackened and seasoned as you see in a lot of Creole dishes, our crushed tomatoes and the Creole sauce. We’re gonna add in our diced tomatoes and then once I have that in, andouille right in on top. I guess times are tough. Back in the old days, we get only one not like with us now, we have plenty arranges with just one paragon in the house and one potty cook the dish. So you find that that’s when a lot of the cooking originated was one part cooking.

We’re using chicken stock right in with this and then lastly what we’re going to do is we’re going to fold in the rice. I like to put the rice ini last because if I had the rice at the bottom, it will seem to distribute itself throughout the dish. We‘re going to put some fresh thyme in there put in some bay leaves, we’re going to take that, we’re going to put it in the oven. I could cook it on top of the stove we’re going to put it in the oven for a moment. We’re going to cook it for about 45 minutes. It’s good.

Well, you know what? I’m gonna do the usual Chef thing. It needs a little ball seasoning. Put in a lot of flavors in this dish and the meatiness, beautiful, fantastic plate of Jambalaya.

Audra Lowe: I love it. I love it. I love it. So delicious and you could also make it at home too. All you have to do is log on to bettertv.com, click on the recipe tab and just look for M Bistro Jambalaya.