The Art of Not Poisoning Your Loved Ones
What started off as a fabulous idea, ended in disaster. In just four hours with under 30 dollars, I managed to make a poisonous concoction that was supposed to become Gumbo Ya Ya.
Yesterday was Fat Tuesday, a.k.a. Mardi Gras. Since I don’t have class on Tuesdays, I decided it would be nice to celebrate Fat Tuesday with a festive New Orleans dish. Originally, I wanted to lean more Creole and make a yummy gumbo, then thought Cajun sounded great and I could make a spicy jambalaya, but decided on what I thought would be a nice compromise–a Cajun gumbo.
Really, the only difference between Creole and Cajun gumbos is that the Creole uses tomatoes and the Cajun leaves tomatoes out. I figured, “Why buy one more ingredient,” and went shopping to make a Cajun chicken and sausage gumbo–Gumbo Ya Ya.
As I was making the roux (traditionally, with oil and flour–didn’t know I could use butter!) which is really just a super fatty sauce, I realized that the bottom of our nicest pan was starting to chip. Then I realized there was black stuff mixing around in my roux that I had to stir constantly for 15-25 minutes. Because of the money I had invested and the fact I’d been working on this now for about an hour, I rationalized that the dark stuff was just leftover chicken burn from when I fried the legs and thighs in the pan just minutes before.
I left my boyfriend starving for dinner until 8pm, though I held him over with leftover lasagna while I munched on FAT FREE potato chips (amazing!!!). By the time eight o’clock rolled around, this amazing gumbo I was making had taken on a life of its own. It kept bubbling over the sides of the pot, spilling oil all over my stovetop; it left me with a destroyed plastic spatula that didn’t withstand 20 minutes of hot oil (duhh).
Then I finally served it. The black stuff went away so it must just have been the chicken. When I tasted my new dish for the first time, I thought I was eating the ocean. Seriously. It was soooooo salty–I’ve never tasted anything so salty in my life. Yes, I used low sodium chicken broth, but I may have used too much when I was seasoning the raw chicken pre-fry.
All night I felt terrible–terrible that I’d made such a mess, terrible that it didn’t have the impact I wanted, terrible that my boyfriend couldn’t grasp that I made gumbo and not jambalaya.
The next day (today) when I went to do the dishes (I refuse to put pots and pans in the dishwasher) I realized that I had in fact totally destroyed our nice pan. The pieces I thought had come up while I was whisking the roux did in fact come up and were swimming in my belly (and Sean’s belly). I dropped the pan into the trash.
So not only were our taste buds assaulted, did at least six chickens die in vain (12 legs, 6 thighs), did I throw almost thirty bucks down the disposal, but right now I have chemicals swirling inside of me doing who knows what for who knows how long. Probably until the day I die.
