Main Ingredients:

See below ingredients and instructions of the recipe

Cooking Preparation of the Recipe:

1 lg Green Pepper, chopped
1 lg Spanish Onion, chopped
3 Stalks celery, sliced
2 lb Okra, 1/2" slices
1 bn Green Onions, chopped
1 lg Tomato, chopped, peeled
- seeded
1 1/2 lb Shrimp (20ct), save shells
1 pt Oysters, small, save juice
1 lb Scallops
2 Chicken breasts, boned
1 lb Andouille or smoked sausage
1 ts Tabasco sauce
1 tb Worcestershire sauce
6 Cloves garlic, minced
8 oz Butter (two sticks)
8 oz Flour (one cup)
1/2 ts Dried Thyme leaves
1 Bottle Doxee's Clam Juice
2 c Uncooked parboilled rice
- use Uncle Ben's converted
1/2 ts Dried Oregano leaves
2 Bay leaves
Salt and pepper to taste
A little MSG
4 c 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 bite-sized
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 1-2 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 2-3 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, re-cover, 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 re-heat, 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 left-overs.
If there are, then use up promptly, because of the seafood content. *

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