Gumbo Z'herbes and faith

Gumbo Z'herbes and Rice by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

I'm cooking from "Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life," New York Times food writer Kim Severson's memoir. In deciding on a recipe to accompany the interview, I lighted on the Gumbo Z’herbes, the recipe included with the chapter on Leah Chase, owner of Dooky Chase restaurant in New Orleans. The profile of Leah Chase is one of the most touching in "Spoon Fed," a woman of faith facing a tremendous crisis - the destruction of her historic New Orleans restaurant, Dooky Chase, in the floods following Hurricane Katrina.

Leah Chase serves Gumbo Z’herbes, or Green Gumbo, on Holy Thursday, to fill bellies before Good Friday fasting. It's a kitchen sink kind of dish, a boatload of greens and meats cooked separately then combined in a gumbo unlike any you've ever tasted. If you have a CSA (community supported agriculture) subscription, this is a dream recipe for using up the bunches of greens that show up weekly in the cool days of early spring. This is stevedore food, rib-sticking and hearty. Invite your friends and neighbors and ask them to come hungry.

I first read about green gumbo in an article Francis Lam wrote for Salon.com and took elements from that recipe, Severson's instructions and Leah Chase's own barebones recipe in "The Dooky Chase Cookbook" to come up with this version. It's one of those recipes that comes out slightly different each time you make it - the combination of greens will change, you may or may not add okra (I don't have Louisiana cred, but I can't imagine making gumbo without okra.), you might add pork instead of beef, or chicken instead of pork. What matters is that you have faith, as in "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1) Cooking is all about stepping out on faith with the assurance that pilot light will turn on, the water will boil and the greens will release their magic into the broth. Give this recipe a try, and if you do, let me know how it turns out.


Greens and alliums for Gumbo Z'herbes by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books


Gumbo Z’herbes (Green Gumbo)
 (adapted from Spoon Fed and Salon.com and the Dooky Chase Cookbook)

2 small ham hocks

At least 7 varieties of the following greens:

1 bunch greens such as mustard, collard or turnip, or all three

1 bag fresh spinach or 2 boxes frozen, chopped spinach

1 small head cabbage

1 bunch carrot tops

1 bunch beet tops

1 bunch arugula

1 bunch parsley

1 bunch green onions

1 bunch watercress

1 head romaine or other lettuce

1 head curly endive

1 bunch kale

1 bunch radish tops

( I used romaine, arugula, curly endive, curly kale, green onions, parsley, 2 (10 oz.) boxes of frozen spinach and a head of cabbage)

3 medium yellow onions, roughly chopped

1/2 head garlic, peeled, cloves smashed

And now for the meat:

2 pounds fresh hot sausage (chaurice is authentic NOLA, look for hot Italian without fennel otherwise)

1 pound andouille sausage

1 pound smoked pork sausage

½ pound ham

1 pound beef stew meat

(I used 12 oz. andouille because that’s the way it’s packaged in my store; 1 lb. kielbasa; 1 lb. boneless beef chuck, fat removed, cut into 1-inch pieces; and 2 pounds hot breakfast bulk pork sausage. Next time, I’m skipping the stew beef and using pork roast or chops or maybe chicken.).

1 (12 oz.) package frozen cut okra, or a pound of fresh okra, trimmed and cut into ½ inch pieces

1 cup flour

Vegetable oil as needed

3 teaspoons dried thyme

2 teaspoons cayenne pepper

3 bay leaves

1 vegetable bouillon cube, optional

Salt to taste

Cooked white rice to serve

½ teaspoon file powder (optional)

Have at the ready two large stockpots or Dutch ovens, the bigger the better, and a good-size skillet.

1. Before preparing the greens and meats, fill up a large stockpot with water and add ham hocks. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer while you work on the greens.

Curly Kale by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

2. Thoroughly wash all the fresh greens, removing yellow leaves, those with spots, and the tough stems. (to remove the stems of sturdy greens such as collards: fold inwardly lengthwise and pull off the stem, it should zip off like the string of a green bean).

3. In a second stockpot, place half the greens, half the onions, and half the garlic. Cover with water and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce to a simmer and cook for up to 30 minutes, until greens are very tender. Transfer greens to a bowl, using a slotted spoon, to cool. Repeat with remaining greens, onions and garlic. When through with the greens, be sure to reserve the cooking liquid (the pot likker if you speak fluent Southern).



Meat for Gumbo Z'herbes by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

 4. Shape the breakfast sausage into mini-meatballs. Heat a skillet over medium heat and sizzle up the fresh sausage mini-meatballs. Cook through, until no pink remains. Using your ever-reliable slotted spoon, remove the sausage from the skillet and drain on paper towels. Resist the urge to clean this pan - you will make your roux in this in Step 11. Reserve the fat from the pan.

5. While the sausage is cooking, prepare the other meats: andouille and smoked sausage should be sliced into ½ inch rounds; the beef and ham cut into ½ inch pieces. Set aside.

6. Back to the greens: using a food processor, or an old-fashioned meat grinder, process the greens, garlic and onions into a puree. Work in batches, adding cooking liquid to loosen the mixture. Set aside.

7. Remove the ham hocks from the ham broth. If there’s meat on the bones, pick it off and set aside. Discard the bones and fat.

Just about now is the cook's Maundy Thursday, the Garden of Gethsemane experience. You look around the kitchen and see dirty pots and pans and you've been cooking for a couple of hours and no finished food to feed your family and guests. How can anything good come out of this? This is where you run with endurance the race set out for you.Take heart, say a prayer,keep your eyes on the prize, hang in there, know that cooking is trust and the God that brought you thus far will carry you through to the end.

And you may want to have the number for Papa John's handy, just in case. (I can't imagine God having a problem with a Plan B.)


8. At this point you will need either one very large pot or two good-size stockpots, so arrange the greens, pot likker and the ham broth so that you will have either the one giant pot or the two medium-sized pots that will hold the finished gumbo.
9. In the two clean pots or one large pot, over medium heat, divide the pureed greens, the sausages, beef and chopped ham. Fill the pots with equal parts ham stock and pot likker, holding back a cup or two of each liquid. Put in the fresh or frozen okra and bring the gumbo to a simmer.

10. Remember the pan with the sausage drippings? Put it over medium heat and using a wooden spoon, scrape up the browned bits of goodness from the pan. Add the flour until combined. Use some vegetable oil to loosen it up and keep cooking until you have a paste, the base of a roux.

11. Keep stirring until the roux is nice and dark. If you’ve cooked Louisiana style before you know to summon up the courage to get that roux good and dark, building flavor and texture in the final dish.

12. When the roux is dark enough, the color of quality dark chocolate, put it in the stockpot or pots with the greens and meats. Add the seasonings – salt, pepper, cayenne, thyme and bay leaves. Taste. Add the vegetable bouillon if you think the dish needs just a little extra oomph.

13. Let simmer for at least an hour, until the meats are tender and the dish is a murky, swampy green. Adjust the liquid level if it’s too thick, using the reserved ham stock or water. While the gumbo’s bubbling away, cook up some white rice, if you're serving right away. (It's a good idea to make the gumbo ahead and reheat - this is one of those dishes that tastes better the next day.)

14. Remember to remove the bay leaves and serve the gumbo over white rice. A baguette is required with this. Be sure to put some hot sauce on the table, too.

15. Bless the meal and tell your company the house rules: the guests can indeed help with the dishes.

Green Gumbo with rice by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

Text & images copyright 2011, Lucy Mercer.

French toast with a funny name: Bostock

Pumpkin bostock. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

 I’m a half-hearted gardener at best - each spring, I clear out the weeds from the flower bed by the driveway and hand the girls seed packets and let them go to town. This year, we planted zinnias and daisies for the bright flowers, pumpkins and watermelons for the kid-pleasing factor (note: Burpee's Cut and Come Again Zinnia is always a winner). They all combined to yield a crazy quilt of blooms and vines in the garden. We faithfully watered through the summer, and in August, the vines got serious and shot out like Audrey II, taking over the garden bed and sending forth  blooms. I wondered if pumpkin blossoms could be stuffed like squash blossoms, with goat cheese, then battered and fried. (and indeed they can, here's a visit to the future: Stuffed Pumpkin Blossoms)

In September, a fruit formed, and here she is, our own little pumpkin buddy:

 Pumpkin is the flavor of fall and I use it to flavor Bostock, the French toast with the funny name. Using Francis Lam’s formula, I infused Challah slices with maple syrup, slathered them with seasoned pumpkin butter, broiled them and topped them with snappy crystallized ginger.

I didn't harvest our homegrown fruit for this treat, instead using canned pumpkin.

Pumpkin Butter

This makes quite a large amount. You may halve this quantity, or make the whole and freeze it until Christmas - a jar of pumpkin butter is a coveted gift.
1 cup apple cider or apple juice

1 ½ teaspoons ginger

1 ½ teaspoons cinnamon

¼ teaspoon cloves

1 tablespoon orange zest

2 tablespoons orange juice

1 ¼ cup sugar

Pinch salt

2 (15 oz.) cans pumpkin puree

1. In a saucepan over medium heat, combine apple cider, flavorings and sugar. Stir and let come to a boil. Lower heat and stir in pumpkin puree. Let cool. Place in plastic container and keep in refrigerator.

Maple Glaze

½ cup maple syrup

½ cup water

½ teaspoon vanilla

Pinch salt

1. In a saucepan over medium heat, combine all ingredients. Bring to a boil, then remove from heat and let cool.

Pumpkin bostock with maple and ginger. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

Pumpkin Bostock with Maple and Ginger
Makes 6 sevings

1 recipe Maple Glaze

½ cup Pumpkin Butter

6 slices Challah bread, 1 ½ inches thick, stale or left at room temperature for a couple hours

1 tablespoon crystallized ginger, finely chopped

1. Preheat oven to 350°. Prepare a sheet pan with foil and a nonstick grid, if you have one. Dip bread slices in maple glaze and squeeze out extra liquid. Place on grid-covered baking sheet.

2. Spread each toast with pumpkin butter. Bake at 350° for 15 minutes. Your kitchen will be unbelievably fragrant at this point.

3. Remove toasts from ovens and sprinkle with chopped crystallized ginger. Serve with hot, black coffee.

Text and images © 2010, Lucy Mercer.

Asparagus Soup Surprise

I love asparagus and was thrilled when this week's Salon Kitchen Challenge was on the subject of my favorite green vegetable. (The story is posted on Open Salon and also below.)

In Francis Lam's weekly wrap-up, I garnered an honorable mention, which continues my unbroken streak of mentions in 2010. Now, if I can just figure out a way to get paid to do this...

Another note: just when you think your children will eat only hot dogs and nachos, they surprise you. Laura, age 11, spied the asparagus soup, dipped her pinkie in it and tasted. "Mmmm. Can I have this bowl, Mom?"

The picture above is the bowl she brought back to me.

Salon Kitchen Challenge: Bean Stews

Last week, I posted two entries to the Salon Kitchen Challenge bean stew contest. The first was about green bean soup and the second a dessert riff on red beans and rice. Both appear below. The dessert recipe got a mention in Francis Lam's round-up.

This week's challenge is for hot drinks and I'm planning a hot chocolate tasting with the girls this afternoon. Wish me luck!

Bright News Today

A favorite writer from the dear, departed Gourmet.com, Francis Lam, has set up shop at Salon.com and runs a competition each week, the Salon Kitchen Challenge, where bloggers post at Open Salon on a given food topic and winners are chosen. Last week's challenge was to revisit an early experience in the kitchen. I wrote about the time I made croissants at home and found out today that my piece was singled out for an honorable mention.

The most exciting thing is Francis Lam read my essay! (I say this with the same inflection as a tween mentioning Taylor Swift or maybe a Vegas cocktail waitress spying Tiger Woods at her table.) The most embarrassing thing is that I didn't proof my article as thoroughly as I should have and the single best line contained a (now-corrected) goof.

read about my honorable mention here. (I post as PB&J)

and read my obituary/tribute to Gourmet here.

And the edited article is posted below.

Goodbye Gourmet, and Ruth Reichl, Don't Forget to Write

The November issue, the final issue, of Gourmet is on newsstands now. I picked it up today to read at lunch, over a ham sandwich and Coke Zero at the bookstore. The Thanksgiving issue has always been the star of the Gourmet lineup, and editor Ruth Reichl has said in the past that as long as she's at the helm, a roasty-toasty turkey will be on the cover of the November mag. I guess then it's fitting that this Rockwellian turkey, bosomy and burnished, is on the cover of the last Gourmet magazine.

It's been a couple weeks since Conde Nast announced it will pull the plug on Gourmet and the issues already in the can will not see the light of print. Some media observers say the final issue marks a sad day for foodies. I say it's a sad day for all who love a perfectly written declarative sentence, the kind that my quirky journalism professor with the geek glasses (long before they were considered coolly ironic), reading aloud a student's work would proclaim "it sings!" With evocative photography and spot-on recipes, Gourmet was a hat trick of words, pictures and food. Words, pictures and food better and distinct from its competitors. Not the brain candy of Paula Deen (bless her butter-basted heart) and some other successfully merchandised chefs/cooks I could name. Not the effervescent entertaining how-to's of Gourmet's kid sister, Bon Appetit. Not the precise execution of Cook's Illustrated, with its clipped narrative describing recipe evolution from disaster to culinary dynamite. Not the idiosyncratic appeal of Fine Cooking, itself newly renovated, hardly a venue for stirring prose, and until recently, not much of one for photographs and design, either.

Gourmet and I go back two decades, when as a newlywed, I decided that the magazine would teach me how to cook. I recently came across a couple issues from those days, and was astounded at the advertising and page count - December 1987 tops out at 278 pages. (I bet the ad staff's Christmas party was a blast that year.) Inside, the much-missed regular feature, Gastronomie Sans Argent, and Laurie Colwin's charming "How to Make Gingerbread." Colwin was one of those writers with a knack for pulling you into her world and making you feel like a cherished friend, one who would serve a cup of Darjeeling alongside a plate of fresh-baked gingerbread, and scribble the recipe on the back of a receipt, apologize for not having recipe cards, and press it into your hand as you left. Colwin departed this world too soon, in 1992, but her books on food are still in print 20 years later. The Gourmet columns are collected in two volumes, "Home Cooking" and "More Home Cooking," and just like Proust, deserve to be pulled from the shelves and re-read every couple of years.

Now to Reichl, a writer I first discovered through an advance copy of her memoir "Tender at the Bone," a fine entry into the "memoir with recipes" genre along the lines of Colwin. Reichl has a similar gift for sharing her life's story through the food that she eats and cooks and it was starting to look like she would always helm Gourmet. Under her leadership, Gourmet brought in even more fine writers, and broadened the scope of its mission to include the politics of food, for example, publishing a story on migrant workers in the tomato fields of Florida; and farm to table issues. For a time, the letters column had a bit of the rant and rave feel to it. I remember a particular letter writer commenting on an issue dedicated to Latin American cuisines stating that they didn't care to get their politics from Gourmet magazine. I say to any party, Democrat, Republican or Flying Purple People Eater, if there's food, set a place for me at that table, that's my kind of politics.

TV viewers watch Food Network for their favorite chefs. Gourmet's readers thumbed the table of contents to find their favorite writers: Calvin Trillin, Ann Patchett, John T. Edge; and at Gourmet.com, scholarly Doc Willoughby, relatable new mom Lesley Porcelli, the enigmatic Francis Lam, (who we'll probably find out one day is Pynchon or Salinger or Harper Lee or some other reclusive novelist who desperately needs an outlet to write about food). Two issues of the past few years stand out: a slim but satisfying edition of food writing featuring the best from its quiver of authors, and the January 2008 tribute to Edna Lewis, the late doyenne of Southern cooks and writers (that issue also included a tribute to the town of my birth, Nashville, Tennessee, composed by novelist and hometown girl Ann Patchett.)

Two decades of Gourmet, and the one word that comes to mind is transcendent, that's my Gourmet experience. Sure, it's wrapped up in its own name-brand world, of Gucci and Baccarat and Rolex, Sotheby's and Chanel. That's not my planet and likely never will be. And maybe that was the problem all along, because magazines, no matter how excellent the editorial product, if they don't have advertisers, they've got bupkis. I've often wondered who the target audience of Gourmet really was, because the advertising, except for the promotions with Goya beans and M&M candies, is geared way out of my price range. It seems unlikely that the Louis Vuitton-wearers of the world would break a sweat over the origins of the tomatoes on their carefully composed salads.

I've always felt a little like the red-headed stepchild relating to this magazine. But I can't deny that the editorial product spoke to my soul. Maybe someday I'll eat a thin-crust apple tart in a bistro in whichever arrondissement one must tour, but for now, I'm content to make that scrumptious tart in my very own kitchen, thanks to the guiding hand of Gourmet.

So, Merci, Gourmet, for 68 years of good food and good living. And here's hoping that an influential someone, somewhere, realizes that Ruth Reichl was on to something important, essential, and life-giving and gives her another shot at culinary magazine greatness. Until then, I'll thumb through the Thanksgiving issue and be thankful for what we all had.