New Orleans-style cooking class

I still have many more photos from our trip to Kyoto and Hiroshima, but first I thought I would share some pictures of cooking class that someone just emailed me. Originally they hoped I would rope my Norwegian climbing friend into cooking (no pun intended), but unfortunately he had to head back to his home country. I decided instead to attempt to make some of my all time favorite dishes from the Big Easy. Here I am setting up with the gal who organizes the events. Notice I finally broke down and bought my own pretty earth-toned apron, so no more pink frilly things.

Due to the high cost of some of my ingredients (particularly that pile of crab legs you see below), I only went with two dishes this time.

This was good because both turned out to be pretty labor intensive. First dish was chicken and sausage gumbo adapted from a recipe by Emeril. Here I tell them about that all important first step of making the roux. I guess I get pretty animated. Then we spent the next 20 minutes whisking that flour and oil. My only regret is that I wimped out and stopped before it got to be a dark chocolate color. I was so afraid of burning it that I stopped at milk chocolate.

After the Roux was done, we tossed in the "holy trinity", broth, spices and some chicken that had been browned. Here they are all showing great restraint in allowing me to do this part with the giant unwieldy chopsticks by myself. The Gumbo then went to work simmering for a good hour+.

Meanwhile, some other students removed great piles of crab meat from shells and combined this with mashed potatoes and bread crumbs, etc., to make crab cakes, which they fried to a nice golden brown.

The crab cakes were placed on a bed of lettuce and smothered with a tart and creamy Remoulade sauce. Sausage was eventually added to the Gumbo with some parsley and green onions and it was ladled over white rice like so.

Voila! And here is the final artery-clogging, indulgent meal.