Keep stirring.
One hour and 45 minutes after I began stirring one cup of flour into one cup of bacon drippings on medium-low heat, we finally dumped the holy trinity of onion, bell pepper and celery into our roux. Today we made our annual Thanksgiving Day Turkey Gumbo – it’s a once-in-a-year gumbo of epic proportion, and really, it’s the only way to properly dispose of the leftovers. As Hank Williams Jr. would say, “It’s a family tradition.”
I think our Thanksgiving guests prefer the leftovers to the actual feast – though Pat’s turkey is heralded far and wide as the best. In fact, he has usurped my own father as the official roaster of the official turkey when we’re back home in Louisiana. He brines it overnight and then flips the bird four times during the roasting process to keep it from drying out.
The result is succulent on the Thanksgiving Day table – and epic in the gumbo thereafter.
We made our first gumbo of the season the weekend prior, during the Saints-Seahawks game. It was a cold and overcast Sunday – rare and perfect football weather for the desert. Many friends who are not from the South were excited to hear we’d made our first gumbo, but couldn’t quite understand why we were making it yet again, not seven days later.
The answer is: We have to take advantage of the few-and-proud gumbo-making days we have out here… And we will not forgo Thanksgiving Day Turkey Gumbo just because we’d already taken a three-hour tour of culinary adventure just seven days prior. A test run never hurts, and what else are you going to do with a leftover Thanksgiving turkey – make a sandwich? Besides, we also had a whole ‘nother turkey (compliments of the grocery store for spending more than $150 and using our frequent-shopper card). So we roasted a second full bird on Thanksgiving Night, after everyone left following the Saints-Cowboys game. A bit much? Absolutely, but the results were worth it.
During our dry run, I tried out my first-ever bacon-grease roux. Its low smoke-point is terrifying, but the results have been exhilarating – and it will be hard going back to vegetable oil roux now that I’ve almost exhausted my year-long collection of bacon drippings. Stored in a jar under my kitchen sink, the bacon grease imparts a silkiness to the gumbo that’s luminous in the bowl and luscious in your mouth. Plus, the kitchen-sink storage reminds me of my deceased Granny Bernice and her under-the-sink biscuit starter, which has been lost to history.
My cousin Ross – Granny’s first-born grandson – now lives with us, and we’ve had a lot of fun making our gumbo with him. In Louisiana, gumbos are as unique as the people who cook them – and each family has a different take on a dish that ultimately ends up in the same place. (Your gullet!) We’ve debated the merits of different roux-making techniques (even a Cajun microwave roux is better than jar roux!) We agreed that the short-cut of using a store-bought rotisserie chicken to throw in at the end is better than cooking chicken breast-meat in the gumbo (who likes boiled meat?). I’ve been scolded on my inability to stir-fry the okra for long enough to “snot” it effectively. Ross has yet to make a gumbo for us, but we still have a month left in the football season – along with the playoffs. He’s got time.
Our Featured-on-National-Television Krewe of Helios-Arizona Gumbo typically takes 3 to 4 hours, start to finish. Making Thanksgiving Day Turkey Gumbo is a momentous undertaking – and if you count all of the lovin’ that went into this gumbo, we started on Wednesday and wrapped it up on Saturday night.
Pat dropped the birds in the brine on Wednesday after he got home from school at 8 PM. He roasted the first bird starting at 10 AM on Thursday morning and plated it at 2:30 Thursday afternoon. We roasted the second bird starting at 6 PM on Thursday evening and did our “chicken pickin'” at 10 that night. All the meat went into one plastic container, and the bones for each bird went into two separate pots for overnight storage. On Friday afternoon, I added carrots, celery, onion, parsley, necks-backs-and-gizzards, to each bird-pot, covered them in water and brought them to a boil. After that one-hour investment, we had a shit-ton of turkey stock – enough for two pots of gumbo with three large containers to freeze for later.
On Saturday, around 3 PM, during the LSU game, we started drinking, and chopping our vegetables – two separate sets because we were making two separate gumbos: Mine, with bacon-grease roux, would be regularly seasoned for civilian consumption – and Pat’s, with vegetable-oil roux, would be Pat-seasoned for like-minded asbestos mouths. I stirred my roux for 1 hour, 45 minutes – Pat stirred his for about 30 minutes. In between, Pat grilled four pounds of sausage – homemade andouille from Papa Tony’s sausage press, two packages of smoked sausage, and andouille from AJ’s (we were disappointed that we didn’t make it to Schreiner’s Sausage before they closed for the holidays – sigh – but AJ’s has a nice andouille, too, and they’re locally owned). We had two, 16-pound birds, and I’m not sure how much meat that yields – all I know is, we wrapped up our cooking at around 9 PM that night.
Ross said that our Thanksgiving Day Turkey Gumbo was one of the three or four best bowls he’d ever had – and he had two bowls and a stomach-ache from eating so much. That’s high cotton for me. Today is NFL Football Sunday, and after about 13 hours of cooking time – and an hour or so of cleaning time – we will enjoy our day of rest.
