Rotten Roux - boo hoo hoo!

My husband lived in Louisiana for five years and loves gumbo.  I've never had it.  He got a recipe from a friend's wife and yesterday was the fateful day I chose to make it. Oh boy.

It was touted as an "easy" recipe.  One look, and I knew it was not. That didn't intimidate me, I've been cooking for 50 years. My Achilles' heel was that I didn't know what it was supposed to taste like, other than "delicious".

The recipe called for a jar of already made roux, which is basically flour and oil, cooked until brown. It's the base of the soup and a thickening agent as well. The premade roux was supposed to make the recipe easy and was "key" to getting the right taste. Originally my husband Steve was going to make the gumbo with my help. Steve has many wonderful skills and gifts, but cooking is not one of them, so he bought the roux and gumbo file (ground sassafras leaves) online.  I thought I'd surprise him by having it made by the time he came home from work. I was so excited to make something that he loved and hadn't eaten for a long time.

I started cooking at 1 pm. I re-read the recipe and enjoyed the enthusiasm of the woman who wrote it out for us.  I could feel HER mouth watering as she put the recipe on paper. This added to my anticipation of a delicious meal.  I got all the ingredients set out and started cooking the chicken and sausage as directed.  I opened up the jar of roux. It was as dark as molasses, which was emphasized as  the secret to getting that great taste.  I tasted it - BLAAAH!  My immediate reaction was "this tastes like burnt dirt!"  DESPITE my 50 years of cooking experience, I IGNORED my gut reaction and thought, "well, maybe it's an acquired taste, and by the time all the ingredients were blended together, it will be good".  Boy was I WRONG. Have you ever done something like that?

Three hours later, after following the directions and adding some high quality smoked sausage and delicately seasoned chicken, I had a huge pot of soup that tasted like burnt dirt! I used all the tricks I could think of to make it taste better.  But alas, I had chicken and sausage and mixture of other ingredients that took on the flavor of the rotten roux. :-(

I woke up at 3:00 a.m. this morning with the lessons of rotten roux ruminating in my mind.  I got up at 4:30 to capture it here.

Lessons learned from rotten roux:

• Trust your gut. Trust your gut no matter what the opinions of others are.  I let the enthusiasm and reputation of this recipe take me off course. Like Maya Angelou said: When someone, or something, shows you who they are, believe them the first time. I gave that rotten roux a bunch of opportunities to be different, to change, to improve. The roux was, and remained rotten.
  
• The base, or foundation of something, is paramount in the taste of a recipe, and adds it's flavor to what's added to it. This principle applies to us as humans. What foundation have you built yourself on?
  
• Looking at it from another angle, we ALL have a foundation of goodness. We are all redeemable and can go back to build on that foundation of goodness - it's our choice.
  
• Finding good in everything is a must for living an extraordinary and fulfilling life.  I just listened to a talk by Wayne Dyer yesterday morning. He talked about Viktor Frankl, who was a medical doctor and holocaust survivor. Viktor wrote the book "Man's Search for Meaning", which I highly recommend.  In it, he said it was imperative for him to find the good in everything in order for him to survive the atrocities he experienced. Viktor said the prisoners would often be fed a bowl of soup for their one daily meal.  It consisted of a fish head floating in dirty water. OMG, if he could find goodness in that, I can find goodness is burnt dirt soup! This thought woke me up early this morning, and allowed me to see what rotten roux had to teach me, and I'm thankful!
  

As I was writing this, the idea of a recipe for "rotten roux redeemed" came up.  I rinsed all the roux/soup off of the chicken, sausage and Cajun trilogy of celery, onions and bell peppers.  I'm going to make a rockin'  roux-less breakfast burrito for my husband.  *see results in picture below - Steve loved it!)

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