patti

I have some vague memory of my mother and father having a heated discussion about smoked sausage vs. fresh sausage in gumbo. Mom didn't grow up with Cajun cooking and she was more willing to break the rules, so to speak, and used fresh sausage a time or two. My father considered it heresy. I just remember eating it and liking it. It's all good.

I'd say amooz boosh, but I could be wrong. And then there's the fact that I've never said it out loud.

Beautiful, beautiful job on the gumbo Dim Sim . Re getting real Cajun or Nawlins food outside Louisiana, I'm an expat Texan and now live about 20 miles outside DC, and you can buy just about anything you can pay for around here, probably second only to NYC area. There is a lot of stuff being sold that is called andouille, but it doesn't resemble very closely the sausage I get from Jacob's in LaPlace. Some of it isn't even smoked, and I doubt the folks making it ever tasted the real thing. Brooks put me on to Jacob's, and it is very, very good, and very coarsely ground. I have a shipment of andouille and tasso due in from them today, and I'm going to post a picture of the andouille uncased to answer a question that came up earlier in this thread. So I guess the short answer is "no", at least not around here. I'm guessing you probably can get the real thing in NYC, but don't really know. Again, great job on the gumbo (but I'll leave the happy dance to Fifi ). THW ← Eighteen (or so) years ago, my parents moved from Louisiana to Washington state at about the same time Paul Prudhomme was making Cajun food renowned and restaurants were trying to cash in on the Cajun craze. One restaurant claimed to have "authentic" Cajun boudin, and my father wanted to try some. The owner stopped by to talk to him, bragging about how good his boudin was, even better than Cajun, because Cajuns used a lot of rice as filler. Needless to say, my father "filled" him in on just how authentic his boudin was. The picture I first used as an avatar here was a picture of my father taking a bite from a steaming platter of boiled crawfish, with a look of sublime happiness on his face. A friend had told him of a place in Oregon where he could get live crawfish and he was having his first taste of them. The crawfish are a different variety than you get in Louisiana, but they certainly did the trick for a man who was missing his home and the food he grew up on. DimSim, your gumbo looks awesome!

Here's a helpful site: Audio Guide to French Culinary Terms I only wish it were more comprehensive.

Fist, that's my opinion, too, that tomatoes are more of a Creole tradition than a Cajun tradition, with the exception of shrimp and okra gumbo. Do you have tomatoes in that one?

Lately, leftover meats like chicken, pork tenderloin, and even roast beef have been made into a Thai curry. The roast beef was the least successful, in my opinion. Meatloaf leftovers make scrumptious sandwiches.

Is shrimp mold one of the jellied salads? Shrimp mold is so delicious, but what a crappy name. I've been given strange looks by non-locals when they hear that I'm bringing shrimp mold to the potluck.

I ordered from Folse's site, too. $49.95 for the book, $15 for shipping, $4.25 for sales tax (since it's in state) for a total of $69.20. Yikes, I don't like seeing that in print. Are you sure you only ordered 2? The first go round it showed that I was ordering 2, when I was only ordering 1, so I had to empty the shopping cart and start over.

My first cookbook was a wedding gift and it was Talk About Good, which is a Lafayette Junior League cookbook. I received River Roads Recipes (Baton Rouge Junior League) shortly thereafter, and these two were my most used books for years, as you would easily be able to tell by the condition they're in. I also like Talk About Good II. New Iberia's Shadows On the Teche is good, and I agree with Brooks about Cotton Country. I don't currently own a copy because I gifted someone else with it, but I'll have to do something about that soon. I absolutely adore reading Marcelle Bienvenu's food and cooking columns, but if you can believe it, I don't own a single one of her cookbooks. Damn, I need to remedy that, too. Last night I ordered John Folse's Encyclopedia of Cajun and Creole Cuisine and I can't wait to get it (although I should've, since Barnes & Noble said they'd have it next week and shipping was $15). A treasured cookbook is one I found at a garage sale for fifty cents. It's a cookbook put out in 1955 by a museum association in the town I grew up in. I never knew of its existence while growing up, and it's fun to peruse, seeing familiar names I'd known all of my life. Here's what it looks like: (Heh, seeing the original price, I realize I didn't get such a good bargain. )

Thank you, ladies, your opinions mean a lot to me. I think one of the problems with the Chinese crawfish is that they wash off all of the fat which renders the crawfish almost flavorless. The Louisiana folks know better. I forgot to say I added a few good dashes of Tabasco sauce, too.

Today I made crawfish etouffee, and may I just say, "Poo-yie! C'est bon!" I made it as simple as possible. I've said in previous posts that I miss the little containers of crawfish fat that used to accompany the 1 lb. packages of crawfish tails when you bought them in the stores. That's where I think all of the good flavor of crawfish etouffee comes from. They don't sell it anymore, but the 2 lbs. I bought recently seemed to have some good fat in the bags of tail meat. I melted one stick of butter and added 2 T. of flour, stirring for about five minutes, not really even waiting for it to change colors before adding my chopped veggies. I let the veggies simmer til almost tender (I had to add a little water midway through), and then I added the crawfish tails. I seasoned with Tony Chachere's once and let it simmer for 10 minutes, gave it a taste and seasoned again. Here it is.

The difference between "Cajun-style" roux and traditional roux is simply the name the vendor has chosen to give it. Ya gotta have a marketing angle, don't you? It's also a locally made, authentically Cajun trademarked product. The so-called instant, powdered rouxs are another marketing angle, aimed at people who are trying to choose 'healthier' foods and want to use less oil in cooking. The flour is toasted and supposedly no oil is needed. Hey, Cajun vendors follow trends, too. They want to cash in on as many markets as they can. Edited to add: Alternatively, it's what FistFullaRoux said.

Just to second, once again, that bit of advice. The stuff ain't just as hot as frying oil can get; it also bonds to whatever it hits, especially skin. It's bad news. ← So, if one is inclined to find jarred roux, where would one find it? Especially in a place like southern California? Not that I would use it but if I need that option, I want to know where I might look. I am thinking of joining this project. ← How 'bout right here: Roux

Kids want their parents to buy cookies, but us parents don't mind buying generous slices of layer cake, like coconut with lemon filling, or chocolate chocolate chocolate.

I went through a phase of over seasoning the food I was cooking. I'm not sure why I lost my touch, but I did. Since then, I've tried to season less, and then if others need to, they can adjust to their taste. It's easy to add after the fact, but once you've overdone it, you're screwed. Also, as my mother got older, she liked less salt, and if she was my guest, I made sure to salt it less than I liked so that she could enjoy it. Everyone else could adjust as needed. One of my bad habits is the use of Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning. I can't seem to stop using it, even if I'm cooking other cuisines. I loves me some Tony's.

I used a dark roux. I'm certainly not dissing Gumbo Z'Herbes itself. I love it. I'm just disssing MY Gumbo Z'Herbes.

What about smoked ham hocks? Is that available to you, torakris? It could work. As others have said before me, there's no hard and fast rule that you MUST have sausage with chicken gumbo. Like FistFullaRoux, I'm torn between arguing for authenticity and using what's available, which is the basis of Cajun cooking. I couldn't help but cringe when one out of state friend reported his substitution of brussels sprouts for okra in his gumbo. Because I don't have a family interested in game gumbos, I make only three: chicken and sausage (andouille or other smoked), seafood (usually shrimp, crab, oyster), and shrimp 'n okra. Of the three I make, shrimp 'n okra gumbo is the only one that includes tomatoes and/or okra. Your mileage may vary. HighChef, John Folse doesn't have a restaurant in Lafayette. He's got Lafitte's Landing in Donaldsonville and I'm not sure what else, but nothing here.

I made gumbo z'herbes once and I probably won't try again. Unlike other gumbos, which improve overnight, my gumbo z'herbes turned into a big ole pot o' greens. NTTTAWT, but that's not what I was after.

I'm not in Vermilion Parish, I'm in the neighboring parish of Lafayette. You've pretty much covered how I like to make shrimp and okra gumbo, and I don't use okra in any other version of gumbo. Smothered okra and tomatoes is also a tasty dish all by itself.

Food Man, beautiful photos of beautifully plated food. You are very creative.

Brooks, I'd perused your gumbo making photos sometime in the recent past, and I was compelled to race over to eBay and search for a drip drop baster roasting pan. I didn't find the exact one up for auction at the time, but I'm still looking (and halfway hoping I never find one, because I don't *need* one). I lust after your pot!

Caribbean Pork from Molly Stevens' All About Braising. Delicious!

About 15 years or more ago, I had the great good fortune to spend about two hours sitting next to Justin Wilson at dinner. I was a speaker at an industry symposium in Baton Rouge and he had been engaged to do the after dinner speech. We were seated on the dais together. Years before, when his comedy albums were selling like crawfish pies, my dad was a huge fan and bought every one that was produced. We got into a discussion about gumbo, partly because he didn't particularly care for the version we had been served. He was doing some further research on gumbo for a series of TV shows on the subject and I told him about The Gumbo Goddess. I did hear that he went and spent a day with her, she was really up in years at the time, but I don't know whatever happened about the TV shows. What a gracious gentleman he was. And he did know his gumbo. I turns out that of all of the wonderful Cajun foods he loved, gumbo was his absolutely gar-ron-teed favorite. So, we are in good company here. ← What I liked most about Justin's cooking show was that it was really, really what people cook and eat down here. Not only what we cook and eat, but also in the same pots most Cajun cooks love, which is Magnalite. However, eGullet sure is making me learn to love other pots <looks at empty pocketbook>. Sigh.

Here's what my roux looked like a few minutes before I added the trinity. It's kind of blurry because I took a one handed pic as quickly as I could while still stirring the pot.

Thanks. Believe me, at the last second I was cussing like a sailor. I thought sure I'd burned it all. Whew!