When I was a kid, my grandma would say things like “Eat this. It is good for you and it will stick to your ribs.” I guess she meant that it would fill you up and possibly make you fat.
I fixed a chicken gumbo recipe for Christmas Eve dinner this year. I am not sure that gumbo fits into the soup family. We kind of served it like a soup. But gumbo is one soup that “sticks to your ribs”. I only had one bowl.
It was delicious. I made mine with chicken and ham. The main vegetable in gumbo is okra and, as a matter of fact, the African word for okra is gumbo. It is very gooey and very filling. It is served with a scoop of rice.
But it has a lot of variations. You can fix it with sausage instead of ham. You can use shrimp and chicken. You can substitute file for okra to thicken it up. Remember how I said that it is gooey. I am not sure if you can still call it gumbo if you take out the okra and put in the file.
I live in Minnesota, so I guess okra is to the people in Oklahoma what wild rice is to the people in Minnesota. We have a lot more wild rice recipes than we do okra recipes. It was a little difficult to find some fresh okra for the gumbo in the last week of December. I have used frozen okra to make the gumbo. When I did find it, I had to sort through the bin to find the ones that were not soft or developing brown spots.
The roux that you make and the cayenne pepper that you add cook through the entire gumbo and make a delicious blend of flavors. It really is a beautiful and great tasting dish. You can find this and some other great soup recipes when you visit eatdinner4two.com.
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