Ducks Mahal

Well, I hope you’ve missed me.  But, knowing you guys, not by much. 

What do I miss about Ritalin?  Actually the way it made my butt tingle.  If you want a butt dingle, actually a spinal cord into your arms butt dingle, get some Ritalin.  Now you ask me, how would I know about Ritalin?  Well b/c at age 43 I was diagnosed as an adult with ADHD and took Ritalin for many years.  I’m off it now.  A side effect profile is it makes one also feel like a wino on Thorazine.  I know – weird.  But fear not, or fear less, b/c one of the prisms of ADHD is the ability to hyper focus.   YOU, have never been LOVED until you’ve had some handsome man like myself or a beautiful lady, hyper focus on you.  Truly.  And, I’ve been hyper focusing on a few projects as of late, none of which are blogging related.  Therefore, I got nothing to blog about.  I’m like a blank blog.  So instead, I leave you with a recipe I finally perfected just this week.  It’s called Rainy Day Gumbo. 

As you know Gumbo, pronounced, Gum Bo, is a staple here where I live perfected by French settlers and the Creole settlers and there are two kinds.  FYI, in a town in Louisiana my mother actually spoke French until she attended school in the 1^st grade and had to learn English.  I often say, if you can’t cook, baby you can’t make love.  So sit back, lay upon those big pillows, let me rub your feet with a nice eucalyptus cream and let me whisper, give yourself to me, Mon Chat you don’t know how to let a man love you, talk about how pretty you are in that French Cajun language as you smell my comfort Gumbo on the stove.  This one is a Creole Gumbo incidentally.  I don’t know that I ever mentioned in this blog that I love to cook.  Here you go – my best.

Please make it yourself and post it and show me your pics.

Rainy Day Gumbo

This recipe is a merger of several gumbos.  It was a gumbo I made from stuff I had in the frig.  It’s real good for a cold rainy day.

Ingredients

4 Tbsp flour

4 Tbsp vegetable oil

½ yellow onion (chopped into ¼ inch dices)

½ green bell pepper (seeded, and inner white parts removed, dice into ¼ inch pieces)

½ red bell pepper (same as green pepper)

1 stalk celery (sliced lengthways into quarters and then diced in ¼ inch pieces)

.5 cup of ale (as in beer)

1 Tbsp Worcestershire

1 Tbsp Tabasco

1-12 inch length sausage (Smoked Hillshire Farms will do, cut into thin slices)

1 large chicken breast (boned and skinned, cut into inch pieces)

2 cups uncooked shrimp (shelled and deveined)

1 clove garlic

Chicken stock (use a 26 oz container of packaged stock from the soup section)

1 Bouquet Garni  (in a piece of cheese cloth about 5”x8” place 1 tsp each of dried basil, oregano and thyme, draw the four corners together and make a small ball, seal the top with cloth string or I use a trash bag twister, make sure not to use anything made of plastic).

Prepare all ingredients in advance.

Roux

In a 2 quart heavy sauce pan, put in flour and then oil and mix into a smooth paste.  On medium heat, cook slowly for 20 minutes, stirring frequently, until the roux turns oak color.  Be careful not to scorch, if scorched, start roux over in a clean pan.

When the roux is ready, add onions, peppers, and celery and cook until tender on the same heat.  This will release the sugar in the veggies and the roux should darken a little more (about 10 minutes), add beer, Worcestershire and Tabasco and let cook while preparing the sausage.

In a separate pan sauté the sausage in a little oil and garlic, add to the roux and then add the entire container of chicken stock and toss in the Bouquet Garni to the roux.  “Bouquet Garni is the French term for a bundle of herbs tied together and tossed into the pot.”

Bring to a boil, then reduce to a low simmer and cook for one hour.  The lower the heat, the better.  The idea is to let the slow heat break down the flour and oil.

I have an electric rice cooker which usually takes 30 minutes to cook a cup and one-half of rice in 3 cups of water.  When the hour of cooking the gumbo is up, I cook the rice. 

While the rice is cooking add the shrimp and chicken to the gumbo and cook for another 20 to 30 minutes.  Let all cool some and serve the gumbo in a bowl on a bed of rice.

Serves 4

Oh don’t that good yeah!!!