Paella - Pronunced "Bleh!"

Well, the vacation is over and now we're paying for it. Particularly when it comes to weight gain. To that end I decided to go along with my loving wife's Weight Watcher's plan. I dig out a WW cookbook, and go through it, tagging interesting recipes. I do not like fish, barely tolerate shrimp. But, my wife and daughter both like shrimp. I come across "Shrimp and Sausage Paella", and decide to give it a go.

Paella is basically a typical ethnic "rice cooked with whatever we got lying around the house today" dish. In this case, unlike say, jambalaya or arroz con pollo, the "What's available" adds up to "Bleh".

I wish I had a photo for you, the dish looked magazine cover beautiful when done. Ah, but how did it taste?

The recipe called for, amongst other things, a pound of shrimp, some saffron, and clam juice. The shrimp makes sense. The saffron? Price for a little sugar packet quantity (3/64 oz.) is $22! Fortunately I got it on sale, 40% off. Still, who would mess with that? The recipe uses a bit of it, but not too much. The taste of saffron is apparently extremely delicate and worth the expense. That delicate taste is utterly destroyed by the introduction of an 8 oz. bottle of clam juice into the mix. Clam juice. There is no more foul substance I've smelled short of some of the Asian fish brews. Clam juice should be used for practical jokes, not for eating. What is clam juice? It tastes like drinking a bucket of dingy sea water bilged up from the dockside where somebody was cleaning off a table after gutting some old fish. Ugh. Disgusting.

So, I inflicted this misery upon the family, with predictable results. When the torment was over, my loving wife read the recipe and noted the part I somehow missed, where it said that the clam juice could be replaced with chicken stock. Argh! I'd have used goat stock instead of clam juice! Yak stock, kangaroo stock, bat stock, cat stock. Nothing walking or flying on this earth could possibly boil down to taste worse than clam juice. I'll never be cooking "Shrimp and Sausage Paella" again, and if I do, it'll be renmaed "Jambalaya" or something.