What’s that? A post, you say? The first one in over a year? *clutches chest* <voice=”Fred Sanford”>I’m comin’, Elizabeth!</voice> An actual old-school weblog post — links with commentary! Well, I’ll be dipped in hot sauce.

Yeah, rumors of my death or abduction by aliens has been greatly exaggerated. Wesly and I would both like to get some more posting done on here, despite the fact that weblogging is more or less dead. We’ll see. Anyway.

What could possibly inspire me to make a post after over a year? THIS! A guy from New Orleans has created a Jambalaya Calculator.

The Jambalaya Calculator is a labor of love devoted to a Louisiana specialty. It’s the equivalent of a detailed cookbook, but an interactive one, in several ways. For starters, it’s crowd sourced from expert cooks.

Instead of a hardback book or an e-cookbook, the calculator is in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, one that could only have come from Louisiana — the land of big-batch outdoor cooking of all kinds. Want to make jambalaya for 150 of your nearest and dearest? Change the numbers in the pink cells. You will need 60 pounds of meat and 24 pounds of long-grain rice.

The Jambalaya Calculator lets the user sort the recipe according to several criteria: The size of the pot, by number of quarts or gallons to prepare, by serving amounts in various sizes.

It’s for the brown style of jambalaya favored across most of southern Louisiana, not the red Creole style of New Orleans. (Sigh.) It’s OK though, I do like me some brown jambalaya too.

This could come in very, very handy.