This weekend we tried to recreate a typical New Orleans recipe following a suggestion made at the Tomatilla blog. The Tomatilla blog is the official home of the Paper Chef competition which this month was dedicate to New Orleans calling for recipes that included characteristic Louisiana ingredients such as sausages and shrimps. Paper Chef also asked for recipes with beer and tomatoes – but I got so excited trying to make a Gumbo recipe that I completely forgot to include those ingredients so I guess our blog is excluded from the Paper Chef competition but the recipe is anyway inspired by it.

Ok, enough preamble. On to the cooking. We’ve always wanted to try this recipes ever since we read it in yet another Owen-influenced creation – the first book dedicated to food blogging recipes. We received this book a few weeks ago and one of the recipes that immediately impressed me was the Gumbo recipe. What a monster!

A broth of chicken and shrimps, something quite devilish called roux and a final dish with chicken, shrimps and sausages alongside a huge amount of other ingredients. If curious you can still find the recipe online.

We could probably spend several hundred words explaining why what we did was anything but Gumbo. First off the sausages were not New Orleans sausages but Sicilian ones – with quite a characteristic fennel taste. We did not spend 4-5 hours on the broth – in fact we dedicated just 90 minutes. We first browned all the ingredients that go into the broth until really golden brown – then dumped a lot of ice to arrest the cooking and brought that back to the boil for another hour.

The thing that got us though was the roux. The roux, according to the recipe we followed, consists of a cup of oil and a cup and some of flour over a medium-high heat until golden or dark according to whether one prefers the Cajun or Creole style – now we hadn’t tried either so we went for just the golden one. We then added all the vegetables to soften/cook in the roux and then added the vegetables + roux to the broth along with browned chicken and sausages. Brought it to a boil and let it simmer adding the cleaned shrimps (whose heads and skin went to make the broth) in the last five minutes.

The results were really quite good - we probably overdid the proportions with the roux and got quite a thick sauce in the end but one learns as one goes. Proper spices would also help although our chillies added a nice kick.

  

Perhaps the most important impression, however, is that any group of people that are able to place claim on such a recipe will need something much, much stronger than a mere force 5 hurricane to stop them. All we can say is that we are looking forward to tasting the real thing in the centre of New Orleans sometime soon.

Fifty-two coffee infused creations - spanning from the improbable sounding capuccino cheese jelly mooncakes to a rather worrying sounding but ultimately wonderfully elegant pate trompe, by a hardcore coffee and chocolate jolt to the most reassuring milk and cookies.

Coffe was put in pots, drizzles on top, most inspiring-ly placed in ice for decoration, and generally cooked in every way conceivable to satisfy the coffee-themed requirements of this month's Sugar High Friday.

The problem is that this incredible range of coffee-themed sweets are quite hard to classify. There are cakes and magic cakes, pies, drinks, granitas, truffles, biscotti - with ( option 1, option 2) and without chunks - , tofu, cupcakes, latte, a most impressive gellee, a most correct wholemeal cake, with sabayon or simply more than one alternative.

People confessed their love, others their mild dislike, others their sacrifice of coffee for a greater love while for others still it is simply not an ingredient that agrees with them but they ventured ahead anyway which is great.

The full list of participants follows (with some showing extreme patience with me but eventually made it) - and I am truly impressed by the variety. Well done to everyone - you are sure to find something to try out in your own kitchen here. I for one am freezing coffee beans in ice for tomorrow morning's frappe.

A Blithe Palate - Espresso Pot de Crème with Honey Sabayon
1x umrühren bitte - Iced White Mocha & Ba-Ci-Co-Frappé
Lick the Spoon - Jolt ake
The Occasional Epicure - Espesso Cakes
Kitchen Parade - Coffee Pots
Chubby Hubby - Vanilla coffee madeleines and warm mocha tarts
A Tenderfoot's Foodventures - P.B.
& Jeyc's Coffee
Lo spazio di staximo - Delizie al Caffé
masak-masak - Capuccino Cheese Jelly Mooncake
Once Upon a Feast - Irish Coffee Pie
Spitoon - Chocolate Pots with Vanilla Ice Cream Affogato.
Dispensing Happiness - Pâté Trompé
Babe in the City - Coffe Ice
Anne's Food - Vanilla Cinammon Latte
lovescool - Chocolate and Vietnamese Coffee Tart
confabulist.com - Milk and cookies
Food Beam - Chocolate espresso cake with caffe latte cream
A Perfect Pear - Salted Caramel Filled Cardamom and Espresso Brownie Cake with Crispy Phyllo Cap and Coffee Gellee
The green jackfruit - Kahlua Chocolate Chunk Cookies
Stephen cooks - Mocha Mint Granita
she bakes and she cooks - Mocha Bars
baking sheet - Black Chocolate Espresso Cake with Bittersweet Glaze
dilek'ce - Coffee balls cake
KUIDAORE - Espresso Orange Panna Cotta Parfait with Coffee Gelee & White Chocolate & Coffee Towers with Mocha Creme Anglaise
Without Garnish- Cafe Latte Pannacotta Pyramid, Graham Crackers with Milk Chocolate Fudge Sauce, Clear Caramel Sauce, and Citrus Tuile
A Cat in the kitchen - Coffee Espresso Cake
chubby cat cooks - Petit Pots Caffe
Küchenlatein - Espresso with coffeetarts and mascarpone
Mrs. Happy Housewife - Espresso Biscuits a la Martha
I like to do stuff.... - Vietnamese Coffee Popsicle
Food & Thoughts - Mocha Chip Pound Cake
Domestic Goddess - Coffee infused pound cake
Brownie Points - Chocolate Silk Tofu Cream
18thC Cuisine - Pots de Crème au Chocolat
stefoodie - an over-the-top triple treat
Taste Everything Once - Espresso-Orange Biscotti
Esurientes - Wholemeal Chocolate, Hazelnut & Coffee cake
Belly-Timber - Swift-Tuttle Dark Chocolate Espresso Berry Comet Truffle
La Dolce Vita - Chocolate eclairs
Do you know the muffin man? - Espresso semifreddo with almond florentine
English Patis - Happy Anniversary Mocha Cupcakes
Seriously Good - Pots de Creme
Culinary Adventures - Black Magic Cake
Grab Your Fork - Coffee hazelnut cookies with dark chocolate chunks
Dessert comes first - Coffee Macadamia Pie
Nordjlus - Cafe Caramel Noix
Walker Eats - Brownies
THe Skinny Epicurean - Double Layer Chocolate Cake

We never thougth growing things could be so exciting. Of course in the UK we had the odd basil pot which seems to persevere no matter how much it was neglected, but here we are talking lemons and oranges, lettuces, peppers and chillies and beans and mints – and it’s only been a month or so.

It may very well wear off – perhaps after a couple of months we will simply be complaining that things aren’t growing quickly enough or that they need too much care, but right now it’s the honeymoon period.

We will be introducing each of the members in turns but the aubergines stole everyone else’s thunder this morning by coming up with this wonderful flowers which will soon turn into nice round violet aubergines.

  

I wish we could be sharing some wise knowledge of how to take care of aubergines. The truth is that we simply bought some stalks, which the lady at the Consorzio Agrario in Modica claimed where aubergines (they just look like green pieces of stick to me). They had tiny-tiny leaves on them and we stuck them in a pot.

Two days later the leaves doubled in size and now, three weeks on, they are a good 50cm high and are actually wonderful plants on their own right. All it took was water and sun… it almost doesn’t seem fair.

However, putting my concerned citizen hat on for a minute, it is also true that the real difficulties arise when people try to intensively cultivate just one kind of plant in earth that has been exhausted because of intensive cultivation and that then needs pesticides because the natural habitat in which one thing eats the other is simply elimintated.

On our part we are looking forward to enjoy the aubergines – hopefully some time in October.

  

It had being going on for about three days. A non-stop high-pitched meowing from what was clearly a very little cat with very big lungs. The first day it was quite hard to figure out where the sound came from. The second day we got it – it was the neighbours house. Only problem was that the neighbours were not in. As the majority of people in town the neighbours had moved closer to the seaside (even if that just means 15 minutes down the road).

So we passed a second night trying to ignore the sound that was becoming increasingly more desperate. Then late in the evening of the third day we spotted him – the neighbour that is. He came to check on the house and was about to leave. It took a bit of insisting to get him to check for the cat. He went in and three minutes later he came back with a little bundle of skin and bone’s which he deposited in Katia’s hands.

This brings us on to problem number 2. Our house is commandeered by a very demanding 10 year-old dog named Lilly who was certainly not going to accept any little bundle of skin and bones no matter how cute.

Anyway, with Lilly behind a locked door and getting increasingly more frustrated we tried to feed the poor thing – still at a suckling stage - while trying to figure out what to do. We could just keep it in one room until it gets stronger. Problem is it couldn’t stand being left on its own. As soon as we moved more than a couple of meters away the complaining started again. And we really needed to sleep.

At that point we noticed that the solution had been staring at us for us time. A cat in the street had been looking up the balcony. The way this cat was listening and trying to see indicated that it might be its mum? We took the little cat downstairs and tried to approach her but she run away. So we left the little one there and stepped back. Thirty seconds later she came, picked him up and whisked him away.

Today we took these pictures…
 

So the little guy not only found his mother but three bothers & sisters as well :-)