Aleve, you complete me.

I crawled from bed this morning into a cavalcade of cracks, pops and cramps. Besides the grease burns, nicked fingertips (no blood drawn… yet) and isolated scaldings, competitive cooking has put the hurt on this 41-year-old body… and I have one more week of it.

Since January 1, I have run, biked and swam a total of 159.63 miles training for my first Olympic-distance triathlon … and thank God for that because I don’t know how I’d otherwise manage my three-day cooking odyssey at Gladiators of Gumbo next weekend.

There are 22 teams competing in my division – non-seafood – and they make no distinction between professional chefs and home cooks like me… nor are they making a distinction between hometown cooks and Arizona interlopers. All tasting by the judges is blind – and they have no expressly stated prohibitions against blatant bribery and underhanded tactics in the People’s Choice division. It’s a popularity contest – this is Louisiana: Vote Early and Often.

Yesterday was supposed to have been my full dress rehearsal. Sweet husband volunteered to roast my turkey whilst I was at work on Friday, so I could come home from my post-work workout to an evening of vegetable chopping, chicken-picking and stock-building.

He put the bird in the oven at 7:11 PM – right as I was emerging from my 2,200-meter swim. I didn’t finish vegetable chopping, chicken-picking and stock-building until 12:55 AM. I realized it was past my bedtime when I sat on the couch, glanced at facebook and discovered it was a friend’s birthday… because it was already tomorrow.

Oh, and sweet husband burned my sausages on one side… because he forgot about them whilst he was spending quality time in the bathroom, talking on the phone to his nephew and surfing the web on his iPad. He’s a multi-tasker, that Pat Bertinelli. He also washed his hands thoroughly upon resuming his turkey-roasting and sausage-burning post-doody duties.

I awoke exhausted on full dress rehearsal day and promptly forgot to put my canned tomatoes in the ice chest, per the official Krewe of Helios-Arizona Gladiators of Gumbo Master Timeline and Shopping List™. Our group of volunteer tasters would be coming over around 2ish… and I knew the food wouldn’t be ready before 3.

So I fired up my trusty Bayou Classic Outdoor Cooker and started the roux-making. After last week’s speed round, I decided to make a larger quantity of roux to extend the cooking time by reducing the surface area of bacon grease and flour contacting the pan. Instead of an 18-minute cook, I coaxed 45 minutes from it and I learned that I could hold the skillet on the edge of the cooker to keep it from overheating. This will be the foundation for my winning Gladiators entry. Stirring the roux on the back porch, I felt into a trance – it looked like spun silk swirling around and around and around… and then I spilled some on my foot and snapped out of it (thank God for my leather clogs and jeans! Safety first!)

Pat returned to the store that morning to buy mulligan sausage – and he returned with the glorious Nathan’s Smoked Sausage. BEST EVER – so perhaps there was a reason for his having burned the first sample. This time, he did not go to the bathroom while the sausages were on the grill. We dumped everything in the pot within the first hour of the cook to let the flavors develop more fully. Total cook time came in at 3:54:21 – and four hours is my projected cooking window for Gladiators of Gumbo. Unfortunately we did not have the Test Cook 1 sample for comparison… because Pat ate it. He didn’t seem to understand why that mattered. 

Tasting notes:

Pat still claims my roux is too light when I add the vegetables. I still claim that I’d rather quit the roux too early than too late and risk valuable cooking time by having to re-do my roux. The volunteers agreed that our heat levels are good – the spice doesn’t seem to overwhelm the taster, but it does develop over successive bites. I still haven’t decided whether to add our Pat and Stacy Homemade Tabasco Sauce – a little dab’ll do ya – because we didn’t have enough to include in all three of our test cooks so I don’t have a baseline comparison (although it was a hit in our Mardi Gras gumbo). Unloading everything into the pot early helps with flavor development at the expense of some turkey disintegration – although I think I have a nice solution for that: Test Cook 1 volunteers had suggested shredding some turkey to ensure there was a bit o’ turkey in every bite o’ gumbo. At 12:15 in the morning, I didn’t want to shred my fingertips into the turkey – but for the Gladiators competition, we will have a combination of shredded and chopped turkey in the pot since we will be starting our preparation at a more reasonable hour. We also have a secret sausage ingredient (of the non-burnt variety) coming from my cousin Stephen in Shreveport.

Now I just need to finalize the official Krewe of Helios-Arizona Master Timeline and Shopping List™ and disseminate it to my army of hungry minions in Shreveport. Oh, and a special shout-out to my friends Kat and Cathie who kindly cleaned my kitchen while I tended the pot. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Without you, I wouldn’t have been in bed at 8:38 PM last night.