fried chicken and sausage gumbo

yes I know, it doesn't sound very Thai. But here is my story. When I came to Austin in 2001, the only cookbook I brought with me was Muekdaeng's cookbook. His website is under renovation and the front page is down but the page for recipes is up. I use his vegetarian egg roll and satay recipe all the time. I was using this cookbook religiously for the whole first year to cook up some food for friends. Even the first dinner with my grad school boyfriend was from this book. I wish he published this in English to share with the world.

One night I was looking at what to cook for the next party and came across this recipe that uses okra. I love okra, I should try to make this. So I did. At the party, my roommate said, this tastes like Gumbo and I said, I don't know what Gumbo is. I went back and looked at his recipe, sure enough, there is a word "Gumbo" in the parenthesis. So, this has been my Gumbo recipe ever since.



The past month, okra is everywhere at the Farmers' Market. I bought a bunch thinking I wanted to pickle them after reading Pickled Okra recipe from Lisa at Homesick Texan. I'm still going to make it but I was distracted by this recipe for Gumbo that I haven't made for a while.

1 whole chicken (about 2-3 pounds)
1 cup diced onions
1 cups diced bell peppers
3/4 cup chopped celery
3 cups sliced okra
1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp paprika
vegetable oil for deep frying
1 qt chicken stock
1 lb smoked sausage
1 tsp chopped garlic

cut whole chicken into good size pieces for frying. You can start by running your knife to split to breast and then go from there. Marinade chicken pieces with salt, garlic powder, paprika and let sit for at least 30 minute, in my case, I let it sit overnight. Mix all purpose flour, salt, garlic powder and paprika in a zip lock bag and shake to mix well. Add chicken pieces into the bag and shake until the pieces are covered with the batter. Save half of the batter to make roux later.



fill a heavy duty pot with oil about 1 1/2 inch high. Heat the oil up until hot, fry chicken until done, about 5-8 minutes on each side.





When done, save 1/2 cup of oil and discard the rest of the oil. Put the oil back into the same pot, scrape the bottom bits and heat it back up. When the oil is hot, add the leftover flour mixture into the pot and stir constantly for about 4 minutes until flour starts to turn dark brown. Be careful not to burn the roux. Take the pot off the heat, add celery, bell peppers and onions and stir fry off the heat until the roux is thicker. Return the pot to the heat and stir fry until vegetables are wilted. Add half of the stock to the pot and stirring quickly until the stock is dark and thick. Add the rest of the stock into the pot. Bring the stock to a boil, add sausages, chopped garlic and okra and simmer for 45 minutes. Meanwhile, pick chicken off the bones, add chicken to the pot, season with salt and pepper and it's ready to serve. Jasmine rice is always the best with everything. I'm a little biased, of course.