Heart-attack Guinness Gumbo

Last year, a friend and I decided to enter the annual gumbo cook-off at the Pub.  We got up early that day, cooked all morning, showed up, and won.  Lots of fun.  So naturally this year we had to do it again.  This time, we started cooking at 8 PM the night before.  Since we were making it even awesome-er than last years, it took longer.  I didn't get home til 2 AM.  Good thing we didn't try to make it the morning of...it wouldn't have been done in time!

Here's a picture of last year's Heart-attack Gumbo:

Here's a picture of this year's Heart-attack Guinness Gumbo:

(there really is Guinness in it...yum)

Interesting that they are the same color...we spent way more time on the roux this year.

I'm not entirely sure how long it took last year, but we definitely did NOT spend an hour and forty-five minutes on it like we did this year.  

That's right, we whisked our roux non-stop for an hour and forty-five minutes. True dedication.

I was a little bit disappointed when I woke up this morning and my right arm hadn't doubled in size from that workout.

I can't give you our recipe or top-secret secret ingredients, but I can give you lots of pictures because I was having fun with my new camera.

meet Meg:  the only witness to the gumbo-magic

The Cooking

the chicken...heavily seasoned

The seasoning mix, thrown together by yours truly.  There was absolutely no measuring involved.

I threw a bunch of stuff into this bowl, and the bowl got dumped into the gumbo.

mushrooms, green peppers, onions, celery

some of the seasonings

BACON!

chicken thighs, cooking away in their bacon-grease bath

browned chicken waiting to go into the gumbo

Somehow our roux started out orange. The colors are a bit skewed here, but it looked a lot like tomato soup.  It eventually turned a very light brown, and then sloooowwwly darkened.

whisk...whisk...whisk some more...

The Cook-off

The tasting.  

There were only 4 entries this year.  They were all good and the rankings were pretty close, it got a lil tense as we watched the points coming in, but our gumbo pulled through and won in the end.

I think there ended up being 15-20 tasters.  They each got a tray with the 4 samples and gave each one a ranking from 1-4.

4: Deliciousness in your mouth

3: Yuuuuuuuuuuummmmmmmy

2: Good

1: I'll eat it

All the points were added up and the gumbo with the most points won.   

Ours ended up with sixty-something points I think.

We each had a bowl of ours after the competition.  

We played countless dart games this afternoon, needed something to do while we drank our Guinness and waited for the results of the cook-off.

Looking forward to next year, when we will win for the 3rd year in a row!  

Nope, I'm not modest at all.