A hearty, one-pot Italian-style meal, made with bone-in chicken thighs, Cajun andouille, potatoes, tomatoes and white beans.

One Pot Italian-Style Chicken Stew

This is a good and hearty, one-pot, Italian style stew, though "stew" is really a loose interpretation here. It's hearty, but not thick and rich as we think of stews to be, but rather a bit lighter, making it fully appropriate any time of the year.

I based my recipe on a bit of a combination of MarkCharles Misilli's One Pot Italian Chicken from the cookbook Easy Everyday Favorites and Jacques Pépin's Chicken Bouillabaisse in his cookbook Fast Food My Way {affil links}, since I find them to be strikingly similar.

A casserole of cubed rye bread, shredded corned beef, sauerkraut and Swiss cheese finished with a savory egg custard.

Baked Reuben Casserole

I know that some of you make a New England Boiled Dinner of cabbage, root vegetables and a full corned beef brisket for holidays like St. Patrick's Day, but I'm a cheater. The Cajun doesn't care much for any of that stuff, so I take a shortcut to get the corned beef and cabbage I want, and he eats leftovers. I've been making it that way for years, using shredded deli corned beef or the canned stuff, and I love it, so it suits me just fine.

That said, I'm guessing some of you have been consuming Reuben sandwiches from the St. Patrick's Day leftovers, something that I also enjoy occasionally, but my husband can also do without. This casserole is yet another way to use some of that leftover corned beef. Almost a strata, except that it's tossed instead of layered, and sometimes referred to as a savory bread pudding, it's apparently a pretty common recipe around the net, though I hadn't made it myself before. The recipe that I patterned it after is from the Taste of Home cookbook, 201 Recipes You'll Make Forever. {affil link}

Classic American-style stuffed cabbage leaves.

Stuffed Cabbage Rolls

I don't really know when it was that I fell in love with cabbage, but I do love it. I can't recall one single instance where my Mama ever even fixed it, but I've certainly made it plenty myself!

My favorite way to eat it is what we in the south call fried cabbage, though it's not really "fried," at least not in the sense of the word that folks automatically think of as fried in the south. It's more of a sauté and braise, or even smothered really. I love it!

Cabbage rolls though?

A smaller batch of classic jambalaya, made with the trinity, rice, shrimp and smoked sausage.

Skillet Jambalaya

There are rice with protein dishes in just about every region of the country. Chicken Bog, Red Rice and Pilaf are some of the top southern favorites, but in my part of the south, it's all about jambalaya. Whatever version you know, they all involve rice, vegetables, protein - and often a variety of proteins - and mostly made in huge batches, intended to feed a crowd, making it perfect for Mardi Gras.

Sometimes a gal just wants some jambalya for herself! I usually make this version with smaller raw gumbo shrimp, somewhere around a 71-90 count, but I happened to be digging around in the deep freeze the other day and a plastic container of jumbo shrimp fell out and the container cracked, so I went ahead and thawed it out. I had no idea what I wanted to do with them, but thawed seafood waits for nobody and must be cooked!