What's on the menu?

Let's take a trip down south for our next menu item shall we? What's on the menu for this weekend is good old fashioned Southern Gumbo! I was able to snag this recipe from my Papa Ramos and was able to make a few tweeks to it to make it my own. Here are a list of the ingredients you'll need:

chicken broth
tomato paste
celery or okra (depends on personal preference)
water
1 onion
1-2 bell peppers
bacon
kielbasa sausage
chicken (breast or thighs)
shrimp
pork sausage (optional)
hot sauce (any kind will do but i would recommend a cheap Mexican hot sauce with Louisianan)
Cheyenne pepper
5 garlic cloves
salt and pepper
seasoned salt
and whatever other seasoning you would like to use for your meats.

Preparation: First you are going to fry you pork bacon, you do this in order to use the grease to sautee your vegetables. This gives them such a powerful flavor, in fact this may be the most important step in this whole process. Once the bacon is done you take it out of the pan and add your diced vegetables and garlic to the grease and get a nice carmel color on them. (you can either add the bacon to the gumbo or not it's up to you). Once the veggies are done you will add them into a large pot. Next we will prepare the meats you selected to be in your gumbo. Use which ever seasoning you'd like for your meat, simple salt and pepper will be fine since the gumbo itself will already provide a lot of flavor. I chose to bake the chicken, fry the kielbasa sausage in the left over bacon grease, boil the shrimp, and make mini meatballs out of the pork sausage and pan sear those. After the meat is all cooked and cut into bite size pieces add it to the pot with the veggies. Add 1-2 cans of tomato paste and a box of chicken broth. Bring to a boil and stir all ingredients together. At this point you can determine how thick you'd like to your gumbo to be. Southern style tends to be thick, but I like mine to be more of a medium thick soup so I either add water or more chicken broth. (chicken broth adds more flavor than water). This is when we add the spice! I like my food really spicy so I add almost half a bottle hot sauce, but you can add as much as you can handle. Since this recipe has more of a tomato base the longer you let it sit the more the flavor intensifies. This is easily a meal you can make the day before and serve the next day and it also has a great longevity for you college students. You can either serve this meal over rice or corn bread, both are great choices.

If you like this feel free to let me know and you can always feel free to make your own changes to this recipe, for example if you are vegetarian I would add more substantial vegetables like eggplant, potato, tomatoes, spinach, and whatever else you can think of.