Black-Eyed Pea and Corn Filé Gumbo

I have always loved black-eyed peas. Not only are they part and parcel of my Southern heritage, but they are also delicious, easy to grow, and easy to shell. 

Black-Eyed Pea and Corn Filé Gumbo

Black-eyed peas are very different from beans even though the two are used in the same ways; they belong to two different botanical families. While beans are decidedly New World, field peas such as black-eyed peas come from the Old World, West Africa to be precise. All the types of field peas are lumped into the term cowpea (from their heritage as animal fodder).

I have eaten all manner of cowpeas under many names and in many colors and shapes, such as crowder peas, Sea Island red peas, black-eyed peas, cream peas, lady peas, and pink eye peas. Culinarily, they are interchangeable and for my taste, the fresh green versions are better than the dried versions. At least, they are very different in flavor profile. A green black-eyed pea will be very mild and quick cooking; dried black-eyes are deep and rich in flavor and need long cooking.

It being just after the first of the year, black-eyed peas have been on my mind. For us Southerners, a batch of black-eyed peas are required dining to bring good luck for the forthcoming year. For various reasons, I did not make my usual New Years' black-eyed peas, so I wanted to rectify that.

As I was walking the grocery store recently, the idea of a black-eyed pea and corn gumbo sprang into my mind unbidden and I stopped by the freezer aisle to score a couple bags of frozen green black-eyed peas and frozen sweet corn kernels. Both of these vegetables freeze well and are among the only frozen vegetables that I use (the odd bag of  pearl onions aside).

Last night was an opportune moment to make said gumbo and so I started as I do all my gumbos by making a roux. Not wanting to set off the smoke detectors in the house, I kept my roux to medium brown, about two-thirds of the way to being a black roux.

A gumbo roux is one part each of fat and flour, heated while stirring, until the flour browns to the shade that you require. The rule of thumb is that the lighter the protein (chicken, seafood) the darker the roux and the darker the meat (venison, pork) the lighter the roux. Back in 2008, I did a pictorial on making roux, if you want to see the process in action.

The next step in making a gumbo for me is to add the trinity (mirepoix, the Cajun holy trinity: onions, peppers, and celery) to the roux which stops the roux from browning further and starts to cook the vegetables. I used one and a half poblano peppers, two stalks of celery, one really large onion, one half a bunch of green onions, and about six cloves of garlic, minced.

After stirring the vegetables in, I added about a quarter cup of my home-grown Cajun spice mix and let it cook briefly before adding a quart of water. If I had a good vegetable stock, I would have used that instead of water. I turned the heat down and left the stew base to simmer for a half an hour at which point, I added two bags of frozen black-eyed peas and let them cook until they were tender, about twenty minutes. After the gumbo cooks for a while, the oil that you used in the roux will gather on top and you can ladle it away.

To finish the gumbo, I added the corn and then I seasoned and thickened it. In terms of thickening gumbo, there are two methods, one from African slaves and one from indigenous tribes. Now would be a good time to mention that gumbo derived from the Angolan word kingombo, meaning okra, The first means of thickening is to add sliced okra to the stew and let it cook in well. The okra will largely disintegrate and all its (frankly, nasty) mucilaginous interior will thicken the stew.

The second method, from the Choctaw tribes native to the Gulf South, is to stir in filé powder, ground sassafras leaves. Sassafras is a small shrub/tree native to the southeast, a shrub whose roots and bark make a nice tea and whose leaves lend a spicy herbal note to dishes, reminiscent to me in some ways of thyme.

I am not the world's biggest okra fan, having had to eat way too much of it as a child and worse, having had to pick it daily as a child. Cutting okra is an unpleasant experience. It grows in hot humid places such as Alabama where I spent my teenage years. And the head-high plants are horribly irritating to your exposed skin, especially when exacerbated by the inevitable sweat born of such a climate.

Although I could have bought sliced and frozen okra at the grocery store, where it is neatly stacked alongside the black-eyed peas, my aversion to it leads me to thicken my gumbos with filé powder whose flavor I prefer. My mother mostly used okra (duh, they had a freaking garden full of it) and sometimes she committed the culinary faux pas of using both okra and filé powder simultaneously, something that could result in your excommunication from the Southern fraternity in certain areas.

I will say that I do love fried okra, just not the boiled crap that my mother insisted I eat or go hungry. Going hungry was very tempting, I must say.

At the last moment, I stirred in a good bit of salt, filé powder, and the frozen corn. I turned off the heat and let the gumbo stand for five minutes to let the corn warm through. Sweet corn kernels need no cooking at all. And there you have it, a quick gumbo of black-eyed peas and corn.

Auburn, AL 2014

For our annual holiday this year, having no cash from coming off the worst winter in memory, we had to keep our vacation on the cheap but we didn't want to do another staycation, so we decided to pack up the Jeep and head for Auburn, AL where I went to high school, where my parents, and my brother and sister and their respective families still live.

There are not many photos here. Unbeknownst to me, the whole week I was coming down with a pretty good cold which I am still feeling two weeks later and that sapped my motivation to do anything. I barely remember the first three days down there. Here are the best 20 of the mere 99 frames I shot during the week: most of what I shot on the iPhone didn't turn out: there must have been grease on the lens. :(

Sandwiches for the Road

Trying to keep the budget to a minimum, the drive time as short as possible, and ensure that we had something decent to eat on the drive, I spent a few minutes on Saturday afternoon between lunch and dinner services putting together these Italian cold cut and pesto sandwiches with baby lettuces from the farmers market.

5:10 AM The Brown Dog is not to be Left Behind

After a busy, busy Saturday night dinner service, we finally got the restaurant closed and I was able to leave about 11pm, to come home and load the car, finish packing, and get showered. All hyped up like that, I was lucky to be able to get to sleep by 1am. Both our alarms went screaming off at 5am, way, way too early for words. But better to get on I-81 early and avoid the truck traffic.

While we were stowing the final things in the car in preparation for leaving, Grace decided that she was going to go with us and hopped right in the car. She wasn't at all happy that I pulled her out.

The temperatures were in the low 40's as we left and when we arrived in Alabama, in the 80's. At home, we had no leaves on the trees, but the trees were leafed out by the time we hit the North Carolina border. And towards Charlotte, it looked like mid-summer. South of Atlanta into Alabama, thunderstorms were starting to build in the afternoon sky. We had a bit of a blow during the night, but nothing compared to what was coming the next night.

After a Day of Travel: Gumbo

After a long, long 11-hour drive that was fortunately uneventful, we arrived in Auburn where we drove on streets to my parents' house that did not even exist last time I was there. It is a very surreal experience knowing exactly where you are but not recognizing anything at all. The first order of business after all that driving was to make cocktails and head out onto the deck and enjoy the wonderful warm temperatures (something that we had yet to experience in Virginia this year).

And what does mom feed her chef son for dinner? Something delicious and comforting: a big bowl of gumbo.

Spiderwort

This Clematis Blossom is as Big as a Dinner Plate

Stunning Bearded Iris

My parents are quite the gardeners and I spent the following morning wandering around the yard that I worked so hard to keep mowed and organized when I was a teenager. It looks very different now: for one, the trees and a lot of the shrubs have 30+ years more growth on them. Coming from Virginia where the spring flowers weren't even open, it was quite striking to see gardens full of flowers in bloom.

She Didn't Share with Anyone!

We established our morning ritual quite soon: plant our asses in chairs out on the deck and don't move. I can't think of anything more appealing on my one week off a year than just sitting and doing nothing. Although we spent the majority of mornings out on the deck, our second morning we did not. After the tornado sirens went off at 3:30 that morning and scared the hell out of us, the cool and rainy conditions kept us inside. Two nights of terrible storms and buckets of rain lashed away at us and the entire East Coast.

Carolina Wren, So-Called Loud Mouthed Yankee, Building Nest

Phoebes are Nesting under the Deck

The deck on the back of my parents' house is new since I was living there. The old deck is now a huge sunroom and the new deck extends out over what used to be back yard. The new deck is situated right up in the trees and with bird feeders all over, the avian traffic is astounding. To have a Brown Thrasher land on a suet feeder not three feet away from me is unprecedented in my life. Two of the more amusing birds were the Carolina Wrens, a pair of which insisted on building a vast nest inside a lantern on the deck right by us, lugging mouthful after mouthful of building supplies all day long, and the Eastern Phoebes which showed off their aerial maneuvers chasing bugs on the wing.



How Can You Tell We're in the South?

Pimento Cheese and Ham with Lime Pickles: It's What's for Lunch

I haven't had pimento cheese in years: it just isn't in my culinary vocabulary, not that I don't love it. I had forgotten how ubiquitous it is in the South: I saw it everywhere. And my mother had made a big batch which we used for lunch sandwiches all week. Here you see it with lime pickles, which in the South means cucumbers pickled using pickling lime, not the spicy citrus lime pickles from India.

A Taste of Home: Shad Roe with Surry Sausage, Capers, and Lemon

My mom let me know some weeks before our visit that my dad would very much appreciate some shad roe, a delicacy in Virginia that is just not available in Alabama. Both my parents are native Virginians as am I and for us, the appearance of shad roe at the market each spring is something that we look forward to with great anticipation. I roasted it on a sheet tray in the oven (the best way of handling the delicate roe so that it does not explode) and served it with a sauce of local Virginia Surry Sausage from S. Wallace Edwards, capers, green onions, lemon, and butter. I really enjoyed it: although we serve a lot of roe at the restaurant, I never get to eat it and this was the first I have had in a couple of years. Delicious!

Ann Cajoled Mom into Making Biscuits

About mid-week, Ann conned mom into making biscuits, not that my mother is ever shy about showing off her biscuit skills. You might note that the flour on Ann's chest is from her not listening to my mom to get her hands out of the dough! The two of them had a good time mock scrapping with each other.

Mr. P., Hardly Working as Usual

Acre Restaurant: Roscoe and His Doughnut Holes

Wednesday, we went out to eat at Acre Restaurant in downtown Auburn after watching my niece Rachel's high school team play and win a playoff soccer game. Knowing that it was graduation week in Auburn, we wanted to go out mid-week before all the families started coming to town for the weekend's celebrations. We almost goofed. My sister insisted that we were going to need a reservation so I called from the soccer stadium and although there were no seats available in the dining room, we managed to secure two seats at the Chef's Bar a few minutes after the soccer game was scheduled to end.

When we arrived at Acre, it was like a circus. Three or four valets were scrambling to park the cars and the one that came up to our car asked if we had a reservation (because we weren't getting in otherwise). Apparently the weekend was getting started early.

We ate nearly the entire appetizer menu in our best restaurant meal so far of 2014. Unfortunately, the light was too dim and none of the food pictures were decent enough to use. We ate a terrific shrimp and grits with a deep-fried grits cake, bresaola, lamb chorizo, cotechino meatballs, spicy mussels, and lamb fries. At one point, Chef David Bancroft mentioned to me that they had Rocky Mountain oysters as a special and I heard Ann pipe up behind me, "Oysters! I love oysters! We've got to have some!" And so I let him put the order in for us. Only after the order was back in the kitchen did I tell her what she really ordered!

In total, we spent about a half an hour chatting with David Bancroft. He tries to source his ingredients locally just as I do and we really enjoyed his food. Sitting at the Chef's Bar facing the garde manger station, we also got to chat with the two garde manger cooks all night. It's a great restaurant with a crew that really appreciates where they work and the products that they serve.

Dad's Smorgasbord

A couple of times during the week, my dad put himself in charge of lunch and apparently he has quite the fondness for canned goods. You see here a smorgasbord of canned pickled green beans, marinated artichoke hearts and six different kinds of canned fish including smoked oysters, sprats, kippers in tomato sauce, sardines, and tuna.



Niece Rachel and Sister-in-Law Laura



Hors d'Oeuvres at John and Kathy's

Late in the week, we went to my sister's house for a small bash for her husband John who just graduated with his MPA from Auburn after retiring from the Navy. They live in the middle of town and have chickens running around the back yard!

Steak and Grits

I ended up bringing a flatiron steak from the restaurant and we grilled and ate that with grits one night for dinner, along with a salad made from lettuces from dad's garden. It is amazing that we just set out our lettuces at home and their lettuces in Alabama are about to bolt now.

Play Ball! Auburn vs. Mississippi State

Our final stop before hitting the road back to Virginia was to take in the Saturday Auburn and Mississippi State baseball game, which the visiting team won handily, much to my parents' chagrin.

"Super Bowl" Supper

On Super Bowl Sunday, during the day, we went to visit friends Jeff and Kelly White at Glen Manor Vineyards and taste some of their delicious wine along with a picnic lunch that we cobbled together from whatever we had laying around. That meant we would not be home to cook for dinner and naturally we wouldn't be cooking during the game either. What to do?

Slow cooker to the rescue! I just love slow cookers—plug them in and forget them! What to make? After our mystery basket dinner the previous Sunday, we had some quail, rabbit sausages, and andouille in the fridge, unused during that dinner. It's not a big leap from these ingredients to gumbo, a dish that with a little advance planning could cook itself while we were away.

On Monday, I browned the rabbit sausages, the quail, and some leftover ground pork which together with mirepoix and a ham hock became stock after simmering for a couple hours. I removed the sausages after about 20 minutes because I wanted to slice them into coins to go into the gumbo at the last minute. The rest of the meat, I picked after it cooled and returned it to the stock, which went into the fridge for the coming weekend.

During a lull on Friday afternoon, I prepped a big batch of trinity—onions, celery, and poblano peppers—and cooked it down with garlic, thyme, and my Cajun spice mix that we refer to as "magic dust." At the same time, I cooked a batch of dark brown roux.

With all this prep ahead of time, on Sunday all I needed to do was put trinity, roux, and stock in the slow cooker and walk out the door. On arriving home from the winery, I put on a pot of rice, added the andouille and rabbit sausages to the gumbo and corrected the seasoning. I thought it was a fitting "super bowl" of gumbo to go with the Super Bowl.

And what to drink? Preston gave us this bottle of 1983 Grand-Puy Ducasse, a Pauillac that was one of the original fifth growths in the 1855 classification. Although 1983 wasn't a super vintage, it wasn't a bad one either and was certainly a much better value than the preceding blockbuster 1982 vintage. The wine as you can see is holding its color well and the tannins are softening. The black currant and the dried blackberry leaf flavors are forward now. I don't imagine this wine getting any better now that the fruit is fading, but I imagine it will hold on for a few more years. It paired just fine with the not too spicy gumbo. Not the ultimate pairing, but not bad either.