So Beautiful or So What Gumbo

This recipe is lifted pretty much wholesale from John's Foodwishes.com blog, but I've posted it here for two THREE reasons:

1. He doesn't put okra in his gumbo, which is ridiculous (in my opinion), and since it's not in his recipe, I nearly forget it every time; and

2. He doesn't have the instructions written down. Anywhere. You have to watch the video to get the cook-times and order of additions.

3. His ingredients aren't listed in the order you use them. Of all my massive, enormous, RAGING pet-peeves when it comes to recipe-writing, THIS IS PROBABLY THE BIGGEST.

I'm sure the whole watch-the-video-every-time thing does wonders for jacking up his hit-counter on YouTube, but it also does wonders for jacking up my cooking, which considering how often I cook this after a full day of work and too many miles of bike-commuting, is not cool, dude. Not cool at all.

So here it is, Chef John's chicken and sausage gumbo, which I learned to cook because of Paul Simon's amazing song "So Beautiful or So What." It's warm, just spicy enough, and makes GREAT leftovers. Definitely not a meal to miss.

Oh, and it's uploaded here for the heroes in the mailroom at work.  Hi guys!

So Beautiful or So What Gumbo

Ingredients

1/3 cup vegetable oil - NOT olive oil or butter, use plain veggie oil
1/3 cup flour

2 onions, coarse-diced
4 ribs celery diced
1 green bell pepper, diced (or a 10-oz bag of frozen diced green pepper, if you're me)

12 oz Andouille sausage, sliced up into 1/4" pieces and cut into quarters
3 cloves garlic, diced
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp paprika
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (I just upend the container and shake it until David stops me)
1 tsp black pepper (same thing here, just shake the pepper shaker 'til someone stops you)

4 cups chicken broth, or as needed

6 boneless, skinless chicken thighs, trimmed (god help you) and cut in bite-size pieces
1 lb okra (fresh or frozen) cut into ~1/2" - 1" pieces
1/2 cup minced green onions

Serve it over rice or cornbread!


Instructions

1. In a big ol' soup-pot (I use my spaghetti pot; a Dutch oven would work too), combine oil and flour.
2. Cook on LOW heat, stirring frequently with a rubber spatula, for 30 minutes. It should bubble, but not too vigorously. It WILL burn, if given half the chance.
3. This is a good time to chop your onion, celery, and green pepper. Or just your onion and celery, if you're awesome like me and buy your green peppers chopped and frozen.
4. Once that's cooked for half an hour, turn the heat up to MEDIUM LOW and add the onion, green pepper, and celery. Stir it around until everything's coated in flour-oil mixture.
5. If you've used frozen chopped green pepper, stir it around some until the peppers have thawed.
6. I usually chop up my Andouille sausage while that's thinking about thawing my peppers. If you can't get Andouille sausage, by-the-by, or if you can't do pork, kielbasa is an okay substitute. Andouille's really the best, though.
7. Turn the heat up to MEDIUM and add in the Andouille sausage, garlic, salt, paprika, black pepper, and red pepper. Stir it around 'til it looks fairly evenly distributed.
8. Add in broth. Now, for the broth, I just dump in 4 cups of water, then add my tbsp + tsp of bouillon. It's never damaged anything to do it that way.
9. Let that simmer on medium heat for about 20 minutes, or however long it takes you to trim your chicken thighs (read: way too !@#$ing long).
10. Trim the chicken thighs and cut them up into bite-size pieces. And when I say "cut them up," I mean with poultry shears. There is NO reason to cut these things up neatly or slowly or carefully. Just, uh, don't cut up your hands. That sucks.
11. Once the chicken thighs are cut up, add them to the pot. Stir until they've mixed in so there are no creepy cold-spots that can stay raw.
12. Cut up your okra and add it in.
13. Simmer the whole mess for about 30 minutes.
14. This is usually when I remember to put the rice in the cooker and get it started. There's no harm in forgetting 'til the gumbo's ready, really, save that you'll hate yourself for delaying the start-time of stuffing-your-face-full-of-gumbo.
15. Add the green onions (which I always always always forget, thank you Chef John for missing the shot in the video I had to watch to get the instructions RAWR).

Serve it over hot rice with a nice cool drink on the side.

Enjoy!