Recipe - Bobs New Orleans Green Gumbo Beaucoup

1 lg Green Pepper, chopped
1 lg Spanish Onion, chopped
3 Stalks celery, cut or sliced up
2 pound Okra, 1/2" slices
1 bn Green Onions, chopped
1 lg Tomato, chopped, peeled &
seeded
1 One half pound Shrimp (20ct), save shells
1 pt Oysters, small, save juice
1 pound Scallops
2 Chicken breasts, boned
1 pound Andouille or smoked sausage
1 teaspoon Tabasco sauce
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
6 Cloves garlic, minced
8 ounce Butter (two sticks)
8 ounce Flour (one cup)
One half teaspoon Dried Thyme leaves
1 Bottle Doxee's Clam Juice
2 cup Uncooked parboilled rice
use Uncle Ben's converted
One half teaspoon Dried Oregano leaves
2 Bay leaves
Salt and pepper to taste
A little MSG
4 cup Chicken stock (about)
Fry pan or deep pot, IRON

This is an authentic family recipe that my mother taught me in 1950 in New
Orleans. It makes a great dinner party main dish. Like chinese food, it is
long on chopping and assembling, but goes together and cooks rather
quickly.

Shrimp First peel shrimp, keep chilled, save shells. Put shells in small
pot, cover with water, bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer for 15
minutes. When water has been reduced by about half, remove from heat,
cool, and strain out shells. Reserve water.

Chicken and sausage Chop sausage and chicken into medium bitesized
pieces, brown in fry pan, drain, set aside.

Okra Cut off stems and tips, slice into 1/2" pieces. Set aside.

Prepare garlic, Spanish onions, green onions, celery, set aside separately.

Roux Melt butter in a large IRON pan or deep pot, add flour. Stir
constantly over low heat until flour is cooked, starting to lightly brown.
Care is needed here because from cooked to burned is a short but tragic
step, but you can start over. After light brown, the color is all
politics, it tastes good.

Once the roux is cooked, stir in garlic and celery. Turn up heat a bit, say
about medium, but stir constantially to prevent roux from burning. After
about 12 minutes, dump in chopped Spanish onions and green pepper,
continue stirring. After another minute or so of cooking and stiring, dump
in the okra. By this time the roux appears to have disappeared, but is
still there, clinging to the vegetables. Continue cooking for another 23
minutes till the okra starts to wilt and become shiny. (If you are using an
iron fry pan, rather than a pot, you will now be running out of space and
will need to now transfer the ingredients to a larger pot to continue.)

Stir in the chicken and sausage pieces. After another minute, mix in
shrimp water, the oyster juice, the bottle of Doxee's Clam Juice (THIS IS
THE SECRET TO THE NOLA FLAVOR!), and enough chicken stock to cover the
ingredients by an inch or so. Add bay leaves, Tabasco and Worcestershire
sauces, spices, salt and pepper. Slowly bring to a boil (over a period of
five minutes or more), stirring frequently. As soon as the mixture boils,
immediately remove from heat and cover.

After five minutes, remove cover, add tomato, oysters, scallops and shrimp.
Give a few more stirs, recover, and wait for 20 minutes. The declining
heat from the mixture will cook, but not overcook, the seafood. From this
point, this mixture should never be brought to the boil again. Now is a
good time to make the rice.

Check for thickness. If too thick, thin out with additional chicken stock.
If too thin, add file' in a separate serving bowl before adding to rice.
Once file' is added to gumbo, do not reheat, as this will cause
stringiness. Just before serving, mix in the chopped green onions. They
should be only slightly cooked, a little wilted but also a little crunchy.

Serve in soup platter, with an island of white rice surrounded by a green
moat of gumbo, meat and seafood. Serve with split buttered and broiled
French bread, and white wine or beer.

This is an expensive dish to fix, and there should be no leftovers. If
there are, then use up promptly, because of the seafood content. *

From Gemini's MASSIVE MealMaster collection at www.synapse.com/~gemini