More chopping this week: onions, bell peppers and celery for gumbo and dirty rice. The need to acquire andouille sausage and filé powder provided an excuse to splurge on a trip to one of my favorite pricy grocery stores. Everything was fresh and from scratch except for the frozen shrimp and okra. Frozen peeled and deveined raw shrimp is a no-brainer. Deveining is a kitchen task I’m happy to outsource. As for okra, it is not a popular fall crop in the Pacific Northwest so I wasn’t really expecting to find it fresh.
Here is where I make a couple of Sunday confessions. First, although one might rave about the seafood or the sausages or the spices in Cajun cuisine, the spark for this meal came from an Indian deli near my office. There is a dish in regular rotation on their lunch buffet filled with okra, chiles and spices. It is so yummy good that it made me take a second look at the odd and slimy vegetable. I am hereby outing myself as an okra fan. Any others out here?
My other confession is a lie. First, I hate lying and liars and I’m mostly not very good at it. This time I lied about liver. Z was initially enthusiastic about the proposed menu but balked at the ingredient list for dirty rice. “Make it without liver,” he directed.
After consulting the interwebs for alternate recipes I countered, “Dirty rice always has chicken liver. Would you prefer something else?” Z offered up an apparent contradiction, “No, I like dirty rice but not liver.” I attempted reason, “You do realize that every time you’ve had it in a restaurant it probably had chicken liver in it, right?” Z held firm, “I don’t like liver. Just make dirty rice, but without the liver.”
Well, I can tell when an argument is going nowhere. I finished my list and went to the store by myself. Being generally in charge of meat preparation in our kitchen, it wasn’t hard to conceal the secret ingredient. Later, when I uncovered the steaming pot, Z said, “Smells good. What’s in it?” I tried a wide-eyed smile, “Sausage.” I’m fairly certain I saw him enjoying seconds.
I don’t follow recipes exactly but found inspiration from:
There is a lot of extra spice blend so I’ll be cooking Cajun again.