Gumbo (and the Night of the Crawling Crayfish)

So I made gumbo this weekend! It was a total experiment that turned out splendidly. I had never made anything like this before so I read up on a few recipes to get the general idea of what goes into making that wonderful spicy sauce and went from there. I generally noticed that the spice combo consisted of thyme, cayenne, and paprika.

My roommate and I went to the Main St. Fish Market in DC Saturday morning to pick up all the goodies for the gumbo. I knew I wanted crayfish, and since they were going to stew in the broth, I wanted them fresh. Yep, I got a heaping pile of live crayfish. I also picked up some clams. While we were at it, we had a breakfast of freshly shucked oysters with a little bit of lemon. Six for 10 dollars...excellent!

I made a broth of chicken stock, cheap white (dry) wine, butter, and water, seasoned with salt and pepper, and let it come to a boil. I threw in fresh cooked chorizo sausage with spring onions, one white onion, and chopped celery. I then scooped in a generous spoonful of Hungarian paprika, cayenne pepper and a handful of fresh thyme leaves.

I then attempted to dump in all the live crayfish when chaos ensued. Note to self: DO NOT PLACE PLASTIC BAG FULL OF LIVING CRAYFISH ON A HOT COOK TOP. This happened:

Those little feckers crawled all over my kitchen (almost three pounds worth of crayfish) and they sure wanted to fight. Once I got them all collected, I bid them adieu and dropped them into the boiling broth.

Once they had cooked for a while, I threw in the fresh clams (making sure that all the shells were closed. Open shells mean that they have died and should be thrown out).

Finally I threw in some fresh curly parsley.

I served the gumbo over coconut rice (rice cooked in half water half coconut milk).

Et voila! This jumbo was super spicy and delicous. A total win. Would love to make it with crab meat, monkfish and some crayfish meat (just to reduce the labor intensive mealtime).

Until next time!