Folks have asked me for the recipes I’m going to use for my Louisiana cooking this weekend. The truth is, I’m not sure. I can’t find all my cookbooks in our giant pile o’ stuff as yet unpacked, and I’m not entirely satisfied with the recipes I have found (Paul Prudhomme’s cookbooks, two of which I dug out, have elaborate recipes that seem too fussy and buttery to me). So I’m going to wing it. I know what the basic ingredients are. I am definitely going to make John Besh’s gumbo, because I’ve been dying to cook from his “My New Orleans” cookbook, which I got right after Christmas. Unfortunately, the Besh tome is somewhere in the Pile. Fortunately, this great short promotional video for Besh and his book has a segment at the very end that features him cooking gumbo, and has a brief screen shot of the gumbo recipe from his book. I paused the video long enough to write the ingredients down, and was able to stop by the supermarket on the way home yesterday. I’ll dig out the Besh book tonight, inshallah, but if I can’t find it, I know enough about basic gumbo-making to go from just the ingredients list. It’s pretty simple, once you have the proportions down: stir-fry the chicken and the sausage, make a roux, saute the diced veg in the roux, add meat, stock and spices, let simmer until perfect, serve over rice. Here’s the video. Enjoy: