As much as I try to improve my cooking, I still find myself often reverting to just chucking a bunch of ingredients into a pot and letting them do their magic.

It all started when I was at university and I was given a rice cooker as a going away present. When it came to dinner, I threw in vegetables, meat, and stock cubes with the rice, and I’d just let it cook.

Yes, I know. Really simple. But it worked!

I think what’s great about this type of cooking is that, besides the fact that it suits someone as lazy as me, recipes can easily be scaled up or down in size to suit the number of people you’re cooking for. They also make for brilliant leftovers.

I am always looking out for one-pot recipes, and I’m really glad I came across this amazing cajun vegan jambalaya recipe.

I should say at this point, I’m not actually vegan. However, I love finding ways to limit my meat and dairy intake, and I love it when recipes like this find creative ways to replace what would normally be a meat ingredients.

This recipe manages to take comforting staples like kidney beans, onions and rice, and blend them with cayenne and paprika. It matches together beautifully.

A few tips:

Show patience with this recipe. Yes it is really simple to put together, but you will need to let it do its thing and allow all the ingredients to cook together at a low heat. This will allow all the beautiful flavors of the onion, cayenne and paprika to work together and permeate the vegan sausage.

Also be sure to allow the rice to cook properly. This will allow it to soak up the broth water, and also absorb the flavors of the other ingredients.

If you would prefer to have meat in this recipe, then just swap out the vegan sausage for your choice of chorizo, or regular pork sausage.

Also, I have vegetable broth listed in this recipe, but this can also be changed to chicken broth.