The other day I thought it would be cool to make gumbo out of some beautiful striped bass and shrimp I’d managed to get my grabby hands on.

Well, if you listened to my podcast with sleepy blair, Emeril steered me all kinds of wrong. I’m not debating his ability to make a fine roux, but for whatever reason, his recipe on foodnetwork.com steered me horribly wrong due to lacking of attention to detail, and I’m definitely at fault for taking “make an old copper penny looking roux” as a given.

Since then, I’ve rallied in a major way and learned what makes a roux work. I’m a big fan of the PBS show “America’s Test Kitchen”, and their recipe for gumbo helped me make a serviceable meal. Since then I’ve thought a shit-ton about roux, about the way oil combines with raw flour, about consistency, about emulsifiers, about how wet heat treats seafood and meat, etc. If you feel confident in making a bearnaise, a hollandaise, and once felt incompetent, even with a simple home-made mayo, I’m right there with you. It has payed off in spades to stack and crack the books, even in the prep for the simple meal I’m about to discuss.

The great thing about cooking, especially cooking with and learning from mistakes, with the intended audience’s taste in mind, is that it can teach one about cooking and everything else that adults have to know in a mixed-up, crummy world. This is a lot like working in an office, except the former incorporates soul and joy, since these are people (friends) one elects to spend time with. Nothing made me realize this more than reading the first thirty-some pages of Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook, which I just received in the mail this evening.

I was zombie tired, having ridden home on my white bike (dubbed “Speed McQueen” by the lady) in a driving rain, having made a beautiful stroganoff over a few bottles of wine, feeling like a dog trying to find a porch to crawl under after finishing that meal’s buy/prep/cook. It rained like a Nintendo end-boss of Precipitation had evinced himself right after I cleaned the final pots and pans, when I was rambling outside to smoke my victory-lap cigarette and read a fucking cookbook while most folks were out at crap bars.

Their loss.

Also, don’t ever use Sensodyne toothpaste if you are at all fond of how food tastes, no matter how much your nerves scream with pain while facing a strong head-wind. I haven’t been able to enjoy anything, even macaroni cheese, without a death-knell amount of salt and a shot of hot sauce since I started using that stuff at my dentist’s request, and this is a week or so after the fact. I keep brushing my tongue like a gastrophile Lady MacBeth, hoping to find virgin taste buds.

Well, there you have it. A curmudgeon in the making. Just previewed sleepy’s new shotgun hootenanny mix, and his work with Kate Bush’s “Running Up that Hill” made a perfect night out of a horrible, rage-filled day. Look for it in the powder blue blogosphere near you.

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