It’s gumbo weather!

And I’m desperately trying to distract myself while I feel like America is crumbling around me, so in the true random nature of the Wild West Edition, I’m here with gumbo. And yes! There’s a recipe! Luckily for you, I’m not one of these recipe blogs looking for SEO clout, so I’ll post it at the top (then I’ll explain my qualifications and blather on some more):

Legit Gumbo Recipe (I promise!)

Ingredients:

• roux (1/4 cup oil, 1/4 cup flour) – I’ll explain how to make it after the recipe, though you might be better off watching a few YouTube videos if you haven’t made one before
• 1 onion
• 3 stalks celery
• 1 bell pepper
• 1 lb sausage
• 1 lb chicken (optional, raw or cooked and shredded – leftover Thanksgiving turkey is also great here)
• 8 cups chicken broth
• salt
• pepper
• 3 bay leaves
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp Kitchen Bouquet
• white rice

Directions:

1. Make a a roux the color of dark chocolate.
2. Saute onion, celery, and bell pepper until they’re soft. Add garlic and saute for a minute.
3. Add the snausages, saute until they look cooked.
4. Add the chicken broth, chicken, salt, pepper, and bay leaves; bring to a boil. Boil until it stops foaming, then turn down heat to simmer. Add kitchen bouquet (and shredded pre-cooked chicken if that’s what you’re using).
5. Simmer half an hour to an hour (make sure chicken has time to cook).
6. Shred the chicken once it’s cooked and add it back in, simmer more.
7. Serve over rice.

This might also be helpful if you’re asking yourself what exactly a roux is:

How to make a roux

Put your gumbo pot (6 quarts or so is big enough) on the stove, turn your heat to low or 2 (as you make more of these things, you’ll get brave and tick up the temperature to make it go faster, but if you’re just starting out and doing that, you’re asking for a burnt roux). Add your oil (I use olive oil, but canola or vegetable are fine, too) and your flour and start stirring slowly. I use a spoontula-thing with a flat silicone tip and scrape it along the bottom to make sure none of it sticks and burns.

Keep slowly stirring – you can look away for *maybe* 30 seconds at a time, but not more than that. It’ll get hot and start to bubble. Keep stirring. Eventually the bubbling will stop, and you’ll end up with a steadily darkening saucy-looking mixture. It’ll keep getting darker and darker until you throw in the vegetables. For a gumbo, you want dark chocolate. For jambalaya, you want milk chocolate. It will take a while. It’ll get hotter, you’ll get hotter, your spatula will get hotter. It might even smoke. At a super-low temperature, you might be stirring for half an hour. As long as it’s not sticking to the bottom and doesn’t start drying and blackening, odds are it’s not burnt. Stir it pretty steadily (again, no more than 30-second breaks – stay off your phone!) until it reaches the color you want, then throw in your vegetables and stir it for a while to stop the roux from cooking.

There you have it. That’s how to make a roux. I was terrified of burning it until I made several of them. Luckily flour and oil are cheap, so at least you won’t be out much money if you burn one. You will be out a hefty chunk of time, though.

My qualifications (my gumbo resume, if you like)

My main qualification is that my dad is from New Orleans and knows how to cook. I also lived in New Orleans for about 15 years, though I’m pretty sure heredity is more important here. That said, this isn’t his recipe because whenever I’d ask him how to make gumbo, he’d just explain that it’s like making jambalaya, but you add water and don’t cook the rice in it. In a lot of ways that’s exactly what happens, but it’s not that simple. This particular gumbo recipe is a mixture between my dad’s jambalaya recipe and my friend Mandi’s gumbo recipe. She helpfully made the connection between jambalaya and gumbo for me (she also got me to use chicken broth instead of water, which is something my dad would never do – he says it makes it too rich. I started using chicken broth in Mandi’s red beans and rice recipe, which is the one I always use – don’t tell my dad lol). Anyway, I know how to make gumbo. A more valid question here is why I feel like I need to explain my qualifications. But whatever. I guess I’m mainly saying that this isn’t some shit AI recipe I pulled off of Pinterest.

Anyway.

I actually learned how to make gumbo recently – only a couple of years ago. I usually only make it after Thanksgiving with leftover turkey, but it was getting so cold and I had some Billy’s Smoked Sausage (iykyk), so I figured the effort would be worth it. I think my main hangup with making things like gumbo and jambalaya is that I dread standing over a roux for what feels like forever. I’m not scared of burning them anymore, but it’s still a Thing.

So! Thank you for listening to me rattle on about gumbo! I feel a little better. If we’d all just cook and share recipes instead of scroll social media, we’d all be better off.