A championship gumbo

For Monday night's BCS national championship game, I whipped up a seafood gumbo. You will see me write about many gumbos and stews in this space, to be sure, but this recipe is definitely a good place for me to start those musings.

What you’ll need:
1 cup, plus three tablespoons of olive oil or vegetable oil (either way, you’re all good)
1 large onion, diced
2 large celery stalks, diced
2, eight-ounce cans of crushed tomatoes
About 2 cups of sliced okra
1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon white pepper
1 tablespoon cayenne pepper
3 bay leaves
6, 8-ounce cans of clam juice
1 ½ pounds of peeled fresh shrimp
1 pint of oysters (you can omit this if they make you squeamish)
1 pound of jumbo lump crabmeat
1 cup all purpose flour
steamed white rice

What you’ll do:
1. Heat three tablespoons of oil in a stockpot, then add the onions and celery. Saute the vegetables until they are tender.
2. Add tomatoes and okra and simmer until the liquid has cooked down. Then, season with salt, peppers and bay leaves before adding the clam juice. Bring mixture to a boil, then lower to a simmer before adding the shrimp, oysters and crabmeat. Simmer about ten minutes.
3. While the gumbo simmers, add the remaining oil and flour to a pan (This would be what they call the roux), whisking until smooth. Continue to whisk the mixture until the roux is chocolate brown. Be careful not to let this mixture stick and burn, because if you do, you will have to throw it out and start all over again and that would suck. Let it cool a little bit.
4. Stir the roux into the gumbo a little at a time (Caution: If you do too much, too fast, it will pop and sizzle all over the place). When all of the roux has been mixed in, let the gumbo simmer about ten minutes more, until it is thicker.
Remove the bay leaves, then serve in bowls with steamed long grain rice.

Welcome to Sauce Piquante!

Sauce Piquante is a food blog written by a 35-year-old Louisiana girl who lives in the Greater Atlanta area with her husband, her sassy toddler and a bipolar hound mix. Though the author has made a living reporting and writing stories for a variety of national publications, she has not penned a word about her one great passion – food.

That changes today.

But first, a few things you should know:

The author is not a professional chef. She has degrees in journalism and history, which means she is only qualified to give you a run for your money on Trivia Night at your local bar. (By the way, you’ve got first round…) So why read this? Why not read it? The author knows some pretty good kitchen tricks, thanks to an endless array of zealous roux-making relatives, assorted cooking classes and a willingness to sit in the kitchen and learn from her mistakes.

This blog is not necessarily about all things Southern or Cajun/Creole/Louisiana, even though the author’s culinary worldview was formed by a childhood of eating gumbos, jambalayas and etouffees. At Sauce Piquante, you’ll see some Asian and African fare, some Latin and Southwestern dishes, even some European and Middle Eastern cuisine, too. Why? Because classic Southern food is not just packed with global influences, but cosmopolitan Southerners – those happy-go-lucky folks thought to be eating nothing more than gravy-soaked this, or super-smothered that -- are embracing dishes from all over the map. Here we hope to explore that vitality whether it’s expressed in a soul food tapas restaurant in Atlanta or a Lebanese bakery in Baton Rouge.

The recipes you’ll see here are the author’s best approximation of what she does, chop by chop, sprinkle by sprinkle, and so forth. After all, she views recipes as a suggestion, not a mandate, so laisser les bons temps rouler.