Coast Cooking!

I spent most of this weekend catching up on my cooking. Saturday I made a big pot of spaghetti sauce to freeze and use to use in lasagna. I also made Oriental Chicken casserole and froze it in 3 small pans for quick week night dinners. I saved two chicken breasts that I cooked for the casserole to use in fried rice this week. I used the broth from cooking the chicken to make chicken stock which I froze in 2 cup servings. Quite productive if I do say so myself!

Since we still had one container of shrimp from the coast (thanks Ms. Anna!), Daniel requested some Shrimp Etoufee. Daniel's aunt and uncle from Biloxi gave us two cookbooks for our wedding, so I used a recipe from Cooking on the Coast for the Etoufee. This cookbook was written by the O'Keefe family, so naturally has some wonderful coast recipes. Let's get started.

The ingredients (a few are missing from the pic, but I was too lazy to add them and take another pictures.


1/4 cup oil
1/3 cup flour
1 cup each; chopped onion, celery, bell pepper
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 pound crawfish tails or peeled deveined shrimp
2 cups chicken bouillon (a rich chicken stock is better)--hello stock from Saturday!
2 bay leaves
1/4 cup chopped parsley
1/2 bunch chopped green onions, reserve tops
2 tablespoons Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce
Salt, pepper and Louisiana hot sauce to taste

Pour oil in black iron skillet, stir in flour. Cook on medium-low until roux is brown, stir often. (I let mine cook about 15 minutes whisking frequently. I let the roux get to a nice golden brown.)
Before:

After:



Add onions (except green onion tops), celery and bell pepper and garlic. Cook until tender.


Add seafood, stock, bay leaf, a little salt and pepper. I also adding the worchestershire and a little Louisiana hot sauce at this point. In the future, I would add a little more hot sauce at this point, but you can always add more later if some don't like heat. Simmer 15-20 minutes.



Serve over hot rice with french bread for 'soppin'!


Daniel and Jonathan seemed to enjoy this dish mightily if the 1 serving of leftovers is any indication. They did request more heat though which is why i added the note above about more hot sauce while cooking.

For dessert, I made a blueberry cobbler recipe complements of my MIL (thanks again Ms. Anna!).

The ingredients are:

1 cup of self rising flour
1 cup of sugar
1 cup of milk
1 stick of butter
1 (I used 2) cups blueberries
**Please note there is no need to use a mixer for this recipe, but mine is so beautifully pistachio that it deserves to be documented on the web.

Heat the oven to 350 and melt the stick of butter in a square baking dish. While this melts, mix the first three ingredients above. Add the blueberries to the dish with melted butter and pour flour mixture over the top. Bake for about 30 minutes or until golden brown. Serve with Vanilla ice cream.


Yummy! Topping is more like cake than the usual biscuity topping. Ice cream makes it!