With football season now in full swing (complete with game cameramen capturing the losing team fans yawning during today’s shut-out), it’s time to roll out the good schtuff. Even though we’re still wearing shorts, certain traditions are beholden to the calendar. As Labor Day snuffed out white shoes, so football in the South ushered in the cooler weather menus, albeit enjoyed in our flip flops.
Because I am hopelessly a right-brained sort, I don’t cook with a recipe book. My kitchen is not unlike a university chemistry lab, with anything liable to blow at any moment. Praise the Lord and pass the safety goggles. This is how I refine my original recipes, like it or not. If it sucks, I pitch it and tweak it.
Okay, so I may consult this or that recipe book or website for a general idea, but, just like I hop in the car and vaguely head in the right direction, I’m not concerned with getting caught up in the unexpected one-way street or having to zip over a couple of extra bridges – it’s the journey, n’est-ce pas? Of course with cooking, it’s also about the destination. Either way, we learn something.
We have a house divided when it comes to gumbo and jambalaya. The points of contention involve tomatoes, rice and shellfish. So today we christened a new stock pot with a new, previously unknown dish. I was naïve enough to think I was being original by calling it gumbolaya until I thought to Google it, and discovered that I’m not the only piece of okra in the pot.
Aiyeeee!
Besides never quite knowing if I’ve got a winner of a dish brewing on the stove, the other hazard of cooking by the seat of my apron is once I determine it’s a winner, it’s nearly impossible to write it down, much less replicate it, because I’ve been buzzing and humming along in the kitchen doing my creating, not paying a lick of attention to how I assembled the masterpiece.
In today’s case, my eyes were bigger than my stock pot, and I wound up ladling a fair portion of the contents of the stock pot into one of my smaller (Pot Formerly Known As the Biggest in the Cabinet) pots, just to make room for the remaining vegetables. The meat alone took up darn near half the stock pot once the roux and broth were combined. That’s okay, though…in a house of 7, I’ve grown accustomed to the face of cooking for a small army. The small (8 qt) pot:
This arrangement allows for the gumbo fans to eat it as-is, and allows the jambalaya fans to drape this concoction over rice (brown rice at our house). So what’s in that pot? Let me try to recall:
In the stock pot, I melted 1/4 stick of butter. This was a drop in the bucket, literally, so I added the rest of the stick. Turned the burner on halfway (4-5/medium). Added 2 pkgs of split/quartered/chopped Andouille sausage and it browned as I hacked up a roasted chicken and threw that in, too. Too lazy to deal with the raw chicken, sorry.
That stuff started sticking to the pot and annoyed me to no end. It was not going according to the gospel of Paula Deen, who promised in her gumbo recipe that 1/4 cup of butter and the sausage would nicely brown. Bull-hocky. This is why I veer off into my own cooking planet. (I someday will publish My Kitchen’s Okay, You’re Kitchen’s Okay..Unless You Have Indoor Cats, Which I Don’t…And Please Don’t Tell Me You Do Halfway Through the Church Potluck).
(We interrupt this post to include a member of the peanut gallery over my shoulder who inserted, “In fact, that would make a great name for a recipe – the “Five Indoor Cat Tuna Casserole.” (this, based upon a church potluck once upon a time in a land faraway which shall remain anonymous)).
So into the pot went another 1/4 of butter. This also quickly threatened to burn on the bottom of the pot despite having it on way-low (I’m so darned precise). In an act of sheer desperation, I grabbed my trusty olive oil out of the pantry and drizzled and drizzled and drizzled. Was the chicken too dry? Was the pot too big? Whatever the issue, I had no time to analyze, and just slopped enough olive oil in there to ensure that my new pot wouldn’t be trashed, and that the darned sausage and chicken would brown. They never really did, but I had to trust that they would be cooked by the time the two cycles of boiling occurred. So be it.
Scrap that phase…I removed the meat and was left with gummy garbage on the bottom of the pot. This turned out to be the KEY to the roux!! I relentlessly scraped and stirred while yet another stick of butter melted in the pot. When it was on the verge of cursing me out, I sprinkled a cup of flour on it and it convulsed and I stirred. Roux is a religion here, so I knew to keep stirring and smiling no matter how ugly it got.
It threatened me with burning and sticking and other forms of culinary disaster, but when I stuck it out and obediently stirred for precisely 10 minutes, it went from a frothy yellow-white to a dark, creamy brown. Emeril would have been proud.
This was when various and sundry family members stuck their head in the kitchen and said, “Mmmm, that smells good! What’s for supper?”
Then came the panic – the stove clock registered 10 minutes, the roux was perfect, and I wasn’t sure what in blazes to do with it – I’d forgotten to get the next step ready.
In a blur, somehow some water-turned broth (I vaguely recall hastily melting bullion cubes in my 4-cup measuring cup in the microwave) got added to the roux (whisked, actually), and I set about chopping and ricing and dicing while it came to a boil.
The first thing to go into the now-dark brown concoction was onion, about two medium-sized ones. And 8 (no, 9 – another accidentally fell off the bulb in the chopping/pressing process) garlic cloves. While those were bubbling and cooking, I samuraied up a bag of red potatoes, two green and two yellow zucchinis, threw in a couple of cans of corn and a couple of cans of stewed tomatoes and 2/3 bag of frozen okra. I’m sure there was some other vegetable I’m forgetting. Oh, yes, I ground in a bunch of fresh-ground pepper and oregano. I was told later the bullion and sausage didn’t do anything for the salt content, contrary to my assumptions, and that salt was subsequently necessary. Okay.
All this nonsense simmered for a good hour before adding a bunch of fresh, chopped parsley. That good hour was time enough to make a cast-iron skillet of cornbread to go with it. Tomorrow I’ll make some rice, since it will probably thicken up from soup state to gunk, and I’ll microwave the leftovers over a bed of rice to perfection. OMG.
That’s how I write recipes.
And yes, it was mmmm (head to the right)-mmmm (head to the left)-mmmm (head going up-to-down emphatically)-good.
And our team won. That is how superstitious culinary traditions surrounding football begin, tailgate or otherwise. If I make this Good Stuff every time we play, we’ll win every time and snag the championship…
Hey, it’s worked more than a few times before, and in our off-seasons, it was great comfort food at any rate.
Roll Tide!