Gumbo!

So I finally made gumbo again. M and I went up to Maine for President's Day weekend. We stayed with her friend up there and had a very good (if chilly) time. I won't go into the details of the whole thing, but I cooked the gumbo in a shallow pan, then rather than simmering it, I put it in the oven to braise for like 3 hours. Here's the basic recipe:

Basic Sausage n Chicken Gumbo
serves 8, apparently

1 cup flour
1 cup vegetable oil

3 medium onions, chopped coarsely
2 red bell peppers, chopped coarsely
4 ribs celery, with leaves, chopped coarsely
4 cloves garlic, minced or put through press

3/4 lb. okra, cut into 1/2" rounds

1 box Swanson's chicken broth

1 Hillshire farms kielbasa or smoked sausage (light would've been better in retrospect), cut diagonally into 1/4" slices
6 boneless skinless chicken thighs, cut into 1" chunks

2 bay leaves
crushed red pepper
dried thyme

• In a 3 qt pan, make a darkish roux with the flour and oil. I stayed lighter than I have before and had good results. I cooked the roux to slightly darker than natural peanut butter.
• Heat a heavy skillet or griddle alongside the pot.
• Add peppers, onions, celery to the roux and stir, cooking, until soft (10 minutes?). This stops the roux cooking, makes it look pasty and clumpy, but it's nothing to worry about. Add garlic halfway through.
  
• Add okra and broth the the pot, stirring until roux is worked in. Thin with water if necessary.
  
• Fry the sausage slices on the griddle/skillet until they have at least some char on both sides. Add to the gumbo as they brown.
• Fry the chicken chunks as above.
• Deglase the skillet with water and add the juices to the gumbo.
• Simmer or braise 1 hour and serve over rice.

Braising for a long time made everything fall apart. The texture was good from the okra, but lacked variety or body. I still like medium-grain sushi rice, like Nishiki for the gumbo, cooked until sticky, and a big scoop in the middle of the bowl, with the gumbo served over and around it (topped with parsley), but a kitchen mishap had us using a mish-mash of Basmati and Nishiki for the rice. It also caused a burn on their formica countertop (oops) and clogged up their drains with half-cooked rice.

The big surprise here was that with salad and dessert, this recipe comfortably fed 8 hungry people. More lessons about portion size, I guess. I hope we get invited back to stay, though I despair of my chances to get invited to cook again after destroying their kitchen and their plumbing. Maybe a curry or a chowder will change their minds.

I can see from reading Hungry Planet, though, that something else interesting is happening. Yes, many of the foods people eat as their culture becomes more globalized are processed and American, but there's this wonderful sharing that starts to happen just beyond that and I think that's something we can look toward. I know I'm well-travelled and have been brought up to eat a varied (if luxuriant) diet, and that I live in a very cosmopolitan city, but if you just look at my various favorite breakfasts to make at home, it shows that there's an amazing variety to be had out there now, and that if you make an effort to visit the various supermarkets of different cultures and learn about their food, you can eat better than ever. All these breakfasts use ingredients available within 20 minutes of my apartment. Assume massive amounts of fresh-brewed drip coffee with whole milk alongside all of this.

• Sunday brunch - two eggs with half a Goya chorizo, 8-10 Ore Ida Texas Crispers fries, Heinz ketchup, Frank's Red Hot cayenne pepper sauce, mesclun salad with a little olive oil and lemon juice if I'm feeling healthy. I have to count the fries because otherwise I'll eat too much.
  
• Smoothie breakfast - Guanabana smoothie (plain lowfat yogurt, honey, apple juice, Goya frozen guanabana pulp) with Swiss Family muesli
• Italian breakfast - Caffe latte instead of drip coffee. Mulino Bianco toasts, Crema de Bel Paese cheese (Italian Velveeta), prosciutto.
• Japanese breakfast - MSG-free ramen with an egg cracked into it.
  

I'm currently reading Hungry Planet. It's a coffee table book. Really interesting. It's got pictures of dozens of different families from all over the world in front of a week's worth of food. The most interesting to me so far has been the Inuit family supported by the hunting father, living above the Arctic circle. Musk ox stew and Coke, anyone? Some of the numbers didn't scan, though. He apparently brought home 175 seals a year. There's only four people in the family. That means one eighth of a seal per day per person. He's probably trading for other stuff, because you can't just live off the fat of the land (or ice, as it were) .

Some of the numbers are amazing. They specifically point out that the 175 Tetley tea bags they report an Australian family of four consuming on a weekly basis is not a typo. Scary, huh? Six teabags each a day. Equally amazing is the sheer volume of food that people still existing on staples eat. The poor indigenous Ecuadorian family of ten goes through 100 pounds of potatoes a week. Makes you realize just how much starch we as a species need to live on. Many of these people are using vegetable oil as a staple, too, adding it just for calories (and presumably to make wolfing down the massive amounts of bland goo a bit less grim).

You can see the progression as cultures start getting ahead of subsistence farming and starting to add more variety to their diets. This seems to be the sweet spot of human dietary health. Rich enough to afford a varied diet, but not rich enough to afford things that have to come from long distances away or to afford to buy a lot of meat. Also not rich enough for their time to be worth so much that they need to start eating convenience foods. Once that happens, they start shopping at the supermarket, buying processed food, eating fast food, getting fat, getting diabetes. The book is remarkable in its journalistic evenhandedness. There is no subtext telling you that one way to eat is better than another. They lambaste the American factory farm for its cruelty, but realize that the poorer parts of the world are still happy to get a mouthful of meat every month or so. What really comes through is that we as a species are able to live anywhere on anything from deep-fried scorpions to dried okra to Pop Tarts.