Gumbo

Hey yall I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’ve been cold for like a week. I can’t stand it so I’m making some gumbo tonight. I live in Coastal Virginia where it’s been cold and rainy for like a week. It’s hurricane season around here I lovingly refer to it as monsoon season, but it’s been gray outside for a week. While that seems normal for Seattle it makes me want to sleep my life away. My family likes to call me the blanket lady because I have so many but who do they come running to when it’s cold outside. My husband has made me a few and they’re fantastic. He has a merch shop on the site for his comfy and colorful beanies!

Anyways, I love the flavors and hearty foods falls brings to the table. The crock pot is really my most used appliance in my kitchen at home. You’ll think I’m wild but after I brown off my veggies and thicken my gumbo a smidge, I put it in the crock pot to finish cooking. Mostly because I run out of room. I don’t know how to cook for just a few people anymore. When I worked at a private school, I cooked my gumbo recipe for 700 kids. It took quite some time to really get a handle on how much food I needed to cook. Those little kids ate so much food that I had to have a new truck come in every day. We almost should have had 2 freezers and walk ins so we could have stayed more prepared. The point is I made a batch of probably 150 lbs. of gumbo that only lasted through like 1 lunch period, so I had to make a batch for the second and third lunch periods.

Preheat skillet and render bacon strips slowly to cook the fat out. Cut up smoked sausage onions green and red pepper celery and brown in skillet. Add gumbo seasoning butter and flour to pan and whisk together the secret to good gumbo is the roux which is the butter bacon fat and flour mixture. The fat to flour ratio is 1 to 1, meaning the same amount of each. You want that paste mixture to turn caramel colored and then add your chicken stock slowly. Another trick is to heat your stock up while you’re cooking the rest of the gumbo, so the sauce thickening time is dramatically cut down. Once that’s done, I transfer to a crockpot for like an hour to let it slow cook and add the okra. I buy mine frozen and just dump in to let cook. As they cook, they’ll let out a little water the gumbo will soak up. Only thing left to do is make cook some rice and cornbread, or at least that’s what I would do.

As always thanks for reading my blog. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please either email me or comment below. Be blessed!