A Zippy & Zesty Cajun Blend for seasoning and blackening. Make a batch which is salt-free and sprinkle salt when needed. This is a wonderful, well balanced meal with flavors from the South.
Make this wonderful blend – adds a essence to everything!
Four recipes:
How to make Karen’s Best Cajun Seasoning Blend
How to Blacken Fish (Local Halibut)
Dirty Rice Cajun Style – a lightened up version
Quick Caper Remoulade Sauce – great with fish… very Southern.
Such a versatile blend – the perfect mix of herbs & spices and fruit (yes – I add lemon peel for a little tang.)
What’s in the blend? Fresh seasonings (not the ones you can not identify that have been lost in your pantry for months!) See the list, many you might already have on hand.
No two blends are alike; the ingredients can vary from just a few to about a dozen. Here’s my version.
Ingredients: freshly ground black pepper, dried granulated garlic, dehydrated toasted onion, dried lemon peel, red chile flakes, chipotle chile powder, dried thyme, ground bayleaf and ground cloves.
Cajun seasoning has a reddish-orange tint to it, and blackens when grilled or fried on meat or veggies.
Cajun Seasonings has so many uses!
It can be used in any dish where you want the flavors associated with Cajun cuisine – yet I like to rub it all over a butterflied chicken and grill it, or add to mayonnaise to liven up veggie, seafood and chicken salads,
Use it to flavor crawfish dishes and for making gumbo, dirty rice, and other Louisiana favorites.
Try it in other non-Louisiana cuisine. It make a wonderful all-purpose blend for stir fried vegetables – and I love coating the fleshy side of salmon before cooking it.
See my recipe for Blackened Halibut – while most prevalent in the North Pacific Ocean – Cajun seasonings add a ton of flavor and smokey heat to the mild, white fleshy fish.
Creole cooking is associated with New Orleans, while Cajun cooking with more rural parts of Louisiana.
Both Creole and Cajun cooking terms are used interchangeably. Creole seasonings seem to add more ingredients to the basic spices- with more herbs ranging from oregano to basil and paprika.
Enjoy!
Karen