Guten Tag! We're baaaAAAaack. Next stop: Georgia Farms!

Katherine here. It's been a while. Ok - much longer than a "while". We have a very good excuse though. We just returned from living in Berlin for 6 months.

One of my favourite places in Berlin: Gendarmenmarkt

An experience that is hard to put into just a few short sentences here in a cooking blog. But we couldn't keep up with the blog because the blog is dependent on one key attribute: trying out new recipes from our large collection of cookbooks. We weren't about to take our cookbooks with us to Germany. So we left them here for our tenants to use (although I don't think they even used the toilet paper we had left for them so I doubt they even touched the cookbooks).

We did loads of cooking in Germany though. The Germans love their pork and potatoes. Oh that's good.... we love these things too (they also love their salami, cheese and beer. Oh what a coincidence. We love those things too. So it all worked our really well on the food front). One thing that was a bit more difficult to get was good (and large) shrimp. Which is why I chose this next recipe to start our come-back tour. As Ben mentioned in our last blog entry (oh-so long ago), we are now on the last row of the our book shelves and those are all our Southern cookbooks. The next book up is called Best of Georgia Farms and was given to me by my mother as a Christmas present way back in 1998. 

The book takes a tour of different counties and cities around Georgia with recipes to match.

The recipe is called 'Savannah Gumbo' and it won first place 'Main Dish' in the 1994 Great Taste of Georgia Recipe Contest - so what could possibly go wrong. Right?

As per usual, it's important to have a few essentials on hand before getting started. Get your music list sorted....

Next up, one LO (Little Monster)....

"Come mummy... come..."

The recipe calls for peanut oil and also banana peppers.Well, I forgot to get peanut oil and good-ole McCaffrey's didn't have banana peppers.

Poblano peppers. Yes - they DO have heat.

I was convinced that poblano peppers would be just as fine. In fact I thought they had just as much heat as banana peppers (next to nothing). Ben tried to explain to me that this wasn't the case and even showed me the handy heat index printed at McCaffrey's pepper section, but no... I put in the poblano peppers seeds and all. Just two - along with a red bell pepper. Those get sliced along with a large Vidalia onion (amazingly McCaffrey's DOES have Vidalia onions... this was also a motivator for me choosing this recipe). Now this is me just doing the prep. To be honest - the hardest thing about this recipe is making the roux. 1/2 cup of oil along with half cup flour. That needs to be slowly heated for up to 45 minutes to make a gloopy (gravy-like) caramel looking liquid. No worries.

Sprinkling the flour in the oil to make the roux.

It seems to be going well. By this time Ben is home and can look after the LO while I carefully stir and watch the roux to make sure it doesn't burn. It seems to be turning a nice color and consistency. 

But with 5 minutes left (of the suggested 45 minutes simmering) I am becoming concerned. It hasn't really darkened much (from the above picture) and it certainly hasn't become any thicker (not like gravy, that's for sure!) These are the things that really stress me out about cooking. I get all excited about doing a new recipe and then think "why the hell isn't it doing like the recipe says?! I am following it exactly!!" Grrrr. So Ben takes over before I get too wound up about it. But things aren't

improving much for him so we decide to proceed with the rest of the recipe. Now it's time to add onion, pepper and garlic, and let cook for 15 minutes.

Stir, stir, stir and don't let that garlic burn!

But after about 10 minutes it doesn't really feel like anything is sautéing properly. You can see below that the flour/oil mixture has coated the veggies and it's more like a batter now. Maybe this is exactly what is suppose to happen? We have no idea (and so are feeling frustrated).

Onion, peppers and garlic "sauteing" in the roux.

Because the onions aren't near to being transparent, we crank the heat up and add more time. That seems to help and so we move on to the next stage of adding the tomato based sauces and the chopped okra.

Rotel, tomato sauce and chopped okra go in.

This is supposed to cook for another 15 minutes before the shrimp go in. But it quickly turns into a seriously thick paste. I mean like you can't even get your spoon through this mixture. Pictures don't do justice to explain how thick it was. But here goes...

So by now I am on the internet looking up other recipes for gumbo (murmuring obscenities under my breath) and many other recipes seem to all call for water damnit. So we add some water damnit. 

Next add water (wait... that wasn't in the recipe....!)

We are feeling better about the recipe now with the water and also after adding the seasoning (salt, pepper and cajun seasoning - although we hold back on the cayenne and red pepper flakes given that the poblano is giving off plenty of heat... whoa!). So now we add the shrimp. We tend to buy the frozen stuff that is in the freezer right next to the seafood section because once the seafood guy told me that that is all they ever do - just defrost the frozen stuff. 

In go the shrimp. 

Actually it turned out much better than we thought it would.

That then cooks for 10 minutes and goes over cooked rice. The final dish actually looks pretty good and tastes pretty good too. However this took a LONG time to make and was stressful throughout with things not working out. Ok - if we were to do the dish again we'd know certain things so it might not be as stressful but I don't feel motivated at this stage to try this one again. I give it 4 out of 10. Also (and this is completely my fault so can't blame the author of the recipe) it was too hot since I added the poblano peppers AND their seeds.