Mighty Rad Gumbo

Gumbo and Rice — photo by Amadscientist — Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

This is the story about a spicey dish with a backbeat that New Orleans taught the world. My friend, Jason, says the best music comes from the worst of times, and if so, we should be rocking our little butts off just now.

But this story won’t make sense unless you’ve been feeling beat down bad like Linda Caroll— following creepy millionaires like Jeffrey Epstein, the CNN report on Motherless and the like. I’m actually wishing some happiness on her so she can lift her head from writing about that sickness, and hope it hits the right notes. Like being stuck in a pigsty with a thumping bass beat around the other side of the barn.

Oh, and a callout to Charlie Brown’s stories about close family dinners. She thinks feeding folks with love is important, plus I hear she likes good wine.

In a latter lineup — with Lowell George absent — Little Feat recorded this song–*Mighty Rad Gumbo, second lining like nobody’s business. No, no, no, no etouffee, no cordon bleu*. As if it doesn’t take skill to pull a righteous gumbo together. Who are they kidding? But it’s a happy song, the way your foot gets to tapping and your tastebuds just smile along with the beat while you’re making the roux. It’s that authentic, with no need for further comment. Paul Barrere and Bill Payne were listed among the credits for the lyrics.

We’d been hanging together as good friends, but after D invited me to a Little Feat concert, it became clear she knew how to boogie way better than me, and we had righteous music in common. We celebrated New Years at a Little Feat concert in Constitution Hall one year. That’s the venue brought to Washington by the Daughters of the American Revolution. You’d need the backstory to appreciate the irony.

There’s a restaurant just outside the French Quarter that does a righteous gumbo they serve for lunch. Had a good reputation, so we took a cab from the Richelieu Hotel. They offered the gumbo as a soup appetizer. Damn good stuff, and the fresh oysters were served with Texas Pete, the way God intended them to be eaten.

Ought to be a law against slurping oysters without a decent hot sauce.

Photo from the Texas Pete website — made special in North Carolina

To brag a bit, I’ve been making shrimp creole for I don’t know how long. Took a recipe off a bottle of Tabasco Sauce, and I’ve been making it, lemme see, since my oldest was in grade school.

First time my girlfriend’s brother came in from playing basketball — I was sleeping over at her house — he saw dinner still warm on the stove and dived right in. After eating about half the plateful, he leaped up from the table, yelling for water. OK, it mighta had a few little bitty peppers in it…

It’s not like I’m some fabulous chef in sheeps’ clothing. But feeding my two boys night after night, I needed to learn something other than spaghetti and pizza, or they threatened to disown me.

It was high time I learned to make gumbo. I know for a fact my momma was Irish, but the old man? He mighta coulda been Creole. Momma insisted both sides of the family were from Pennsylvania, but my birth certificate blames South Carolina, so it makes me wonder. Maybe he was one of those devilish Mexicanos that Massa Trump be going on about to distract us from his good friend, Jeffrey.

So I’ve been evolving a fair representation of Cajun gumbo — looking for the best summer peppers and making the roux with flour, olive oil and andouille sausage. Man, if you don’t get the roux right, you’re wasting the shrimp — that’s all I can say. As for the heat in the dish? It needs to be deep seated, so it doesn’t jump right at you in the mouth. It’s when you feel that volcano rumbling in your belly, that’s when it’s best. And don’t forget the cornbread. Cornbread is essential for cooling things down a touch.

My cornbread recipe comes straight from The Blue Point restaurant on the Outer Banks. This sweet smiling Southern waitress, when I asked, could I have the recipe, returned with it typed and everything. Of course, when the recipe calls for using a hotel pan for size, I realized I needed to walk back on the quantities. That was at least a decade ago — she’s raised her kids since then I think, but she still smiles at me.

Reminds me of *Treme*, a David Simon story on HBO starring New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

If you didn’t catch Treme, only three and half seasons — which still upsets me — the lives of these folks are as real as they can be, and it’s a paeon to N’leans music in all its complicated ethics and searching to not miss out on the best things, music and smoking dinners.

Just thinking about Wendell Pierce riding in a taxi with his trombone makes me smile. I may need to go back and watch the series again. I hear ol’ Wendell is playing Othello on Broadway these days, and good on him! Watching Treme, or even The Wire, you wouldn’t know he’d studied at Julliard.

I won’t pretend Treme is all happy times — but neither was Katrina.

There’s a darker side to some of Little Feat’s songs. Lowell George eating himself with drugs, yeah, that too, but some of his best songs were planted in the weeds of hit-and-run sex and how much fun he was chasing. Fat man in the bathtub — he was a wise ass songwriter. Sadly, he believed in his own persona, so it seems. Back in grad school, I saw him join Bonnie Raitt on stage for a concert at Yale, man with a black hat and long black coat. Rumor was she and he had a thing for a while. Drugs and sex and rock and roll.

I mighta been a rock and roller, liking sex and music like I did — OK and an occasional joint, only I hated practicing and couldn’t abide the smokey bars.

These guys in Little Feat–and they were all guys in the early days — lived the lives of touring musicians for way longer than most, and that’s not a healthy lifestyle. No matter how many cheering fans, come nighttime, you still have to lie down in your lonely bed for another hotel one-nighter.

I had a crush on a girl in the Miami office who introduced me to the bassist for Pure Prairie League. She volunteered a backstage pass to one of their shows. I’d have left my ex back then, except this girl had a thing for the bass player. Watching them after the show packing up to travel to the next show taught me living on the road wasn’t so glamorous, no matter the cheering crowds.

Lowell George’s solo album, Thanks, I’ll Eat It Here, includes a classic song by Rickie Lee Jones. ***Easy Money** is her wicked funny story about two inner city ladies conniving to get a man caught in their room so they can hustle him. Rickie Lee, the girl’s first big hit was Chuck E’s in Love, but I’ll take Easy Money*. Lowell’s version is right tasty. I’da married Rickie Lee, except I was already in love with Joni Mitchell — oh, and Emmylou Harris to be sure. You see a theme here?

There’s dark and needy, and then there’s dark and darker stories. Stories so dark you know you’ve landed in hell. The CNN reporting about Motherless is nothing but darkness, like you’d need to take a shower and sleep with the lights on afterwards.

When I lived in Miami, Lewis and I played guitars on the weekend. We’d roomed together our last year at Clemson in a basement apartment where, when a girlfriend came to visit, we ‘took out the back porch’ rather than taking out the garbage. And we bought a load of coal for the fireplaces come winter. Just after we found that fist-sized hole in the back of the pantry, Lewis said not to mention the ginormous spider he’s seen scurrying into that hole to his girlfriend, she being of the delicate persuasion.

Lewis was the musician cum architect, and I was the architect cum wanna be guitarist, though I could hold a tune, being half Irish and part Welsh. One of our favorites was Willin’ by Lowell George and Little Feat. It was something of an anthem for us in those days — give me weed, whites and wine, indeed. I did like the weed and wine. And the horny girls in those days participated about as eagerly as the boys. The 70s were the good old days of herpes — before AIDS. Mind, I was a witness more than participant in that kind of behavior, but I mighta coulda been willin’. I mostly sinned in my heart, like Jimmy Carter usta say.

Once we were out of school and I was living in Miami, Lewis lived up the road in Boca Raton (Spanish for Tale of the Rat). We played steel string guitars and drank until the beer ruined our voices — plus Lewis still smoked cigarettes in a hangover from all-nighters at school. He smoked, and I drank gallons of Coke to stay awake in the design studio. We played for friends and family, smoked premium pot fresh from Columbia, and drank beer. Saturdays came and went in a hurry. Practice took time away from writing my fantasy story, and working for minimum wage, which was sucking my soul dry.

Playing in the living room, then getting up to relieve myself, I passed the opened door to a bedroom where a girl who said she’d sworn off sex work was giving a guy a hand job while another guy waited. True story. Maybe just a side hustle. So if that’s not dark, it is sad.

I’ve never figured how to separate love from lust, which probably has kept me out of trouble: if you don’t plan to fall in love, stay the hell away. But it’s depressing to think of all the twisted ways the species has contorted desire. Nothing I care to write about.

So, as for gumbo, always buy same-day shrimp, and when out of season, frozen okra will have to do. Jalapeňos with plenty of white streaks saying they’re ripe — if they’re just green, don’t bother. A splash or two of Lee & Perkins, and if the peppers aren’t hot enough, there’s always Tabasco sauce — the real stuff, no imitation. Texas Pete in a pinch, Mexican chili powder, sautéed onion, garlic and poblanos — you should pass on the green peppers.

D asks me to taste the raw jalapeňos with the pith and seeds so we know they’re hot enough. She usually asks, “Is that too hot?” while my eyes get all watery and I’m racing for the faucet. Her brother’s a lot more cautious when he eats with us these days. You’ll know the jalapeňos are kick-ass when you’re sauteing them with the onions and the smell is making you cough. Reason for sauteing the peppers? It helps disguise the capsaicin.

Jason says he’s into ghost peppers. I’m more into the peppers with flavor, habaneros for instance, though not in a gumbo, for god’s sake, or you’ll never taste the roux.

Nah, I’m not forgetting the roux: fresh andouille sausage — sliced into chunks easy to handle with a spatula, but thin enough so you have lots of surface area. If you buy them pre-cooked, you won’t render much fat. Browned in butter or olive oil in a cast iron skillet with a covering screen, or it’s guaranteed you’ll be sliding on a greasy kitchen floor. You’re looking to brown the sausage dark without burning it — so cast iron is the only way to go. Stainless if you don’t have cast iron, but never non-stick. Ever.

When the sausage is properly browned, pluck and set it aside, leaving the oil. Two or more tablespoons of flour to equal the oil, being sure to scrape the frying pan for the brown bits. This step is fast and furious. Browning the flour is the goal, burning it isn’t. Think of it like making a good pan gravy with flour and sausage.

Additional to the flavor, what you’re working to achieve with the roux is the richness coming from — let’s get real — the sausage fat. If you’re not into sausage, go for the butter.

I don’t know how many other ethnic regions chase fried food as much as the deep South. All I know is it’s one southern tradition I endorse. As for the heat, God meant us to enjoy spicey food with a side of homemade cornbread. No store-bought cornbread comes close. No, no, no, no etouffee.

As I was writing this, my Pandora station had moved on from Little Feat to Mick’s song about being so hot for her that he’s a bleeding volcano. Bleeding is a classic Brit expression, only this time it fits. Mick’s the consummate showman — he taught the world white boys can shimmy good — and this particular line of his, I do believe, is sincere.

Will you be my Dixie chicken? Yes, ma’am, I’m willin.

There’s too much hate in this country right now. Self hate, really. No one can possibly enjoy torturing other creatures without a ton of self hate to begin with. It starts in grade school belittling your classmates who could be a little poorer, a little slower and the like. A slow kid in Catholic school named Gregory was tortured to no end — he wasn’t too bright, but he sure as shit didn’t deserve being teased like they did, even the girls in my class. Trump never made it out of grade school, I don’t think.

If you associate with that shit, it’s corrosive in the worst way.

I fix my mind on music — and making a meal for friends to gather around. Sitting down with folks to enjoy some spicy gumbo is a cure for self hate — and it helps with constipation. That’s my story.

Linda, if you ever make it down this way, give us a call. We’re always up for dinner.