At Table: Greenmarket Dinner Five, Gumbo

Feel free to cluck your tongue. Nose scrunching and eye rolling are entirely acceptable as well.

There are some dishes that are so near and dear to my heart that when I read about someone treating them lightly — skipping steps, bastardizing the recipe with low-fat substitutes, going about it all with a microwave — I feel instantly cranky to point of needing to click away. And wishing I could kick said person in the shin.

I’m sure a lot of people feel this way about gumbo, which is what we made last night — Dinner Five — with Saturday’s greenmarket okra.
















I had never made gumbo before, and as I know it to reside on a certain pedestal, I had no aspirations of rising to such heights. When I bought them, I had every intention of currying those okra and stuffing the eggplants with ricotta. But the eggplant was up at bat first, and as R. isn’t the world’s biggest eggplant fan — certain varieties, in certain preparations, make his tongue itchy — I wound up pitching him Tuesday’s eggplant as a curry, knowing he’d loved it when our friend Ben’s mom made it and so he'd go for it. But which then left me without a plan for the okra.

Frying it and roasting it were both options, but neither of those do a whole meal make.

When I headed to the grocery store the other day (to buy coconut milk for the curry, though little else; I must say, the odd produce assortment I dragged home on Saturday really did go a long way) R. requested sausage. I brought home spicy chicken sausage from the Pennsylvania-based Murray’s, which according to its website uses no hormones or antibiotics, feeds the chickens a vegetarian diet, relies on small family farms, and delivers only to the Tri-State (New York, New Jersey, Conn.) area, so it doesn’t need to use preservatives.

So there was "sausage" in the house, Epicurious offered up what it did, and last night we sat down to gumbo. Which was delicious. But which we knew could have been even better. And that we should have taken it far more seriously, and slaved over it for far longer than the hour that we did — me stirring the roux until it was a reddish-brown, while R. sautéed the sausage, and then the orange and yellow peppers, onion, and celery, and later garlic, organic fire-roasted canned tomatoes, okra, and a canjun spice mix we put together following Emeril’s advice. Which is the first time time we’ve ever done so for anything.

What I’m saying is that it was good. But I know it should have had shrimp in it as well, and even fish, and we should have made a special stock from the shrimp shells. What I’m saying is that I know you’re out there — you who hold gumbo tight and close to your heart — and that I offer this news of my little gumbo, a lighthearted gumbo, with no intended disrespect. I know you know better. I know your gumbo reigns supreme. I just hope you’ll send me the recipe.

Feel free to sigh huffily when you hit “Send.”