A Serious Eats adaptation of John Besh’s My New Orleans recipe is after the break to remind myself to do this before the weather gets too warm, otherwise competing cravings involving smoked pork shoulder and other summer-y foods will begin to overtake.

Chicken and Smoked Sausage Gumbo

- serves 10 to 12 -

Adapted from My New Orleans by John Besh.

Ingredients

1 cup rendered chicken fat or canola oil
1 cup flour
2 large onions, diced
1 large chicken, cut into 12 pieces
2 tablespoons Basic Creole Spices (recipe follows)
2 pounds spicy smoked sausage, sliced ½ inch thick
2 stalks celery, diced
2 green bell peppers, seeded and diced
1 tomato, seeded and chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
Leaves from 2 sprigs fresh thyme
3 quarts chicken stock
2 bay leaves
6 ounces andouille sausage, chopped
2 cups sliced fresh okra
1 tablespoon Worcestershire
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Filé powder
Tabasco
White rice for serving

Procedure

1. Make a roux by heating the chicken fat or oil in a large cast-iron or heavy-bottomed pot over high heat. Whisk the flour into the hot oil. It will immediately begin to sizzle. Reduce the heat to moderate and continue whisking until the roux takes on a deep brown color, about 15 minutes. Add the onions, stirring them into the roux with a wooden spoon. Reduce the heat to medium-low and continue stirring until the roux is a glossy dark brown, about 10 minutes.

2. Season the chicken with Creole Spices. Add the chicken to the pot, raise heat to moderate, and cook, turning the pieces until browned, about 10 minutes.

3. Add the smoked sausage and stir for a minute before adding the celery, bell peppers, tomatoes, and garlic. Cook, stirring, for about 3 minutes. Add the thyme, Chicken Stock, and bay leaves. Bring the gumbo to a boil, stirring occasionally. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer for 45 minutes. Stir occasionally and skim off the fat from the surface of the gumbo every so often.

4. Add the andouille, okra, and Worcestershire and season with salt and pepper, several dashes of filé powder, and Tabasco. Simmer for another 45 minutes, continuing to skim the fat off the surface of the gumbo. Remove the bay leaves and serve in bowls over rice. Pass more filé at the table.

Basic Creole Spices

- makes 1/2 cup -

Ingredients

2 tablespoons celery salt
1 tablespoon sweet paprika
1 tablespoon coarse sea salt
1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon garlic powder
1 tablespoon onion powder
2 teaspoons cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice

Procedure

Mix together the celery salt, paprika, salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, cayenne, and allspice in a bowl. Transfer the spices to a clean container with a tight-fitting lid, cover, and store.

I’ve never been to Two Urban Licks, but I HAVE been to its older sister restaurant, appropriately named, One Midtown Kitchen (okay fine, “ONE. midtown kitchen”).  Maybe it was because it was many years ago and Richard Blais was on hand in his pre-Top Chef days, but it was quite a delicious dining experience.  Also, the Atlanta restaurant blogosphere in general have given it some favorable words.  And for $15 for all you can eat ($21 for all you can eat AND drink), it was too good of a deal to pass up.

Well, I’m glad I went in with not a lot of expectations.  When we got there, while waiting in line for the valet, I was explaining to L why we’re eating in renovated warehouse in some out of the way abandoned industrial area.  We concluded that it was because restaurants are poor, and so they’ve wound up marketing their cost-savings as something “trendy”.  As soon as I opened my car door to the valet, it started going downhill, just as you would expect for dining in an abandoned warehouse.  It started with them trying to give my reservation away.  We got there a few minutes late, but Aaron had boldly gone in before us to get our table, only to be shot down to discover that our table reserved for 6 got cut down to 4, claiming it was a first-come first-serve basis.  Yeah, that wasn’t going to fly with me and my month-old reservation.  By the time I stormed in there, they magically had a table for 6 for us.  Weird.

The place was packed out.  Once we sat down, the food started coming.  A cast iron dish of hummus, a Mediterranean cucumber salad, some small pita rounds, and a place of smoked lamb and roasted potatoes.  I shared a similar sentiment with my fellow diners when they looked around and was like, “That’s it?”  It’s hard to use the word “splurge” for the equivalent of one entree, one side, and one appetizer.

Regardless, our hunger surpassed any complaint and we dug in.  Quick initial food review:

Cucumber salad – mediocre
Hummus – garlicky, with a hint of peppers
Pita rounds – somewhat stale
Lamb – smoky, but cold
Roasted potatoes – mushy

The all-you-can-drink part of the meal consisted of a cheap Spanish red and a white that I didn’t pay a particular amount of attention to.  Bottles were all open and not full by the time they landed on our tables, which leads me to suspect some discrepancy between what’s on the label and what’s in the bottle.  I personally didn’t have any, but it didn’t seem like I was missing out on much.

Service was also fairly abysmal.  Granted, the server to table ratio could have been better for such a busy night, but our server definitely paid more attention to the table behind us than us.  Automatic gratuity was added on for our table of 6.  That probably had something to do with it.

Successive food refills were delayed and inconsistent.  The second plate of lamb was so raw that JW thought it was an entirely different dish.  When we finally grabbed the attention of our server, she tried to pawn it off as medium rare.  For someone who takes pictures of everything he eats, this meal was so unmemorable that it didn’t really matter.  Besides, I forgot my camera.  But had I brought it, I think I would have taken a picture of “medium rare” raw lamb.  The third plate had maybe 5 pieces of lamb and 48 chunks of mushy potatoes.  The fourth was the most tolerable, as it was a) warmer than room temp, b) actually cooked, and c) we all got at least 1-2 pieces.  Unfortunately, having no other scapegoat, the lamb wound up being overcooked and became an exercise in not cramping up your jaw muscles.

During the course of this meal, the kitchen ran out of pita circles as well as red wine, with a run on the white.  That’s okay, by this point we were legitimating discussing Taco Bell as a finisher.

So that’s that.  There are two more “splurges” scheduled for March – one for chicken and one for seafood.  Caveat emptor.

Maybe their actual order-off-the-menu items are better.  But Two Urban Licks (I will use proper capitalization thankyouverymuch), you did not leave me with a very good impression.  I’d choose your big sister over you, but at the end, it’s still Concentrics Restaurants that gets my money.

“If the U.S. imperialists start another war, the army and people of Korea will … wipe out the aggressors on the globe once and for all,” a dispatch from the official Korean Central News Agency said.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Better turn over the kimchi now, Kim Jong-Il.  Don’t forget, we’ve got Barack Obama.

With that, I leave you this little glimpse of what we’re up against:

Earlier today, CNN anchor and Beijing correspondent John Vause was filming in Tiananmen Square, Beijing when he suddenly encountered a man holding an umbrella who won’t step away from his cameraman’s lens. Maybe it’s the matching umbrella and pants, but this goes down in our book as the silliest censorship effort ever.

Come on China.  This is just straight up embarrassing.  If you’re going to exercise some government holier-than-thou power, at least do it in respectable uniforms.  Did you really think, “Oh, if we have plainclothes cops with umbrellas, maybe the rest of the world will just think our citizens are rude instead of our embarrassment of a government flopping around like a dying fish on the world stage”?  Probably not.  That thought is FAR too advanced for your little communistic minds.

So in the spirit of Web 2.5 (the logical progression between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0), we’ve put up a site/blog up at http://www.georgeandlinda.com.

In our advancement towards Web 2.7, we also have a Twitter feed!  Follow our adventures at @georgeandlinda.

Once we get the Facebook fan page up and the iPhone app in the App Store, we should be getting pretty close to Web 3.0.

Yes.  That’s right.  Be jealous.  It’s a completely normal feeling.  Embrace the envy.

That’s like almost $100 worth of coffee you’re looking at right there.

We’ve redefined office coffee.

http://news.cnnbcvideo.com/index.shtml

Shameless plug for Northridge and their awesomeness.

Appetite for China’s 100 Chinese Foods to Try Before You Die

1. Almond milk
2. Ants Climbing a Tree (poetic, not literal, name)
3. Asian pear
4. Baby bok choy
5. Baijiu
6. Beef brisket
7. Beggar’s Chicken
8. Bingtang hulu
9. Bitter melon
10. Bubble tea
11. Buddha’s Delight
12. Cantonese roast duck
13. Century egg, or thousand-year egg
14. Cha siu (Cantonese roast pork)
15. Char kway teow
16. Chicken feet
17. Chinese sausage
18. Chow mein
19. Chrysanthemum tea
20. Claypot rice
21. Congee
22. Conpoy (dried scallops)
23. Crab rangoon
24. Dan Dan noodles
25. Dragonfruit
26. Dragon’s Beard candy
27. Dried cuttlefish
28. Drunken chicken
29. Dry-fried green beans
30. Egg drop soup
31. Egg rolls
32. Egg tart, Cantonese or Macanese
33. Fresh bamboo shoots
34. Fortune cookies
35. Fried milk
36. Fried rice
37. Gai lan (Chinese broccoli)
38. General Tso’s Chicken
39. Gobi Manchurian
40. Goji berries (Chinese wolfberries)
41. Grass jelly
42. Hainan chicken rice
43. Hand-pulled noodles
44. Har gau (steamed shrimp dumplings in translucent wrappers)
45. Haw flakes
46. Hibiscus tea
47. Hong Kong-style Milk Tea
48. Hot and sour soup
49. Hot Coca-Cola with Ginger
50. Hot Pot
51. Iron Goddess tea (Tieguanyin)
52. Jellyfish
53. Kosher Chinese food
    
54. Kung Pao Chicken
55. Lamb skewers (yangrou chua’r)
56. Lion’s Head meatballs
57. Lomo Saltado
58. Longan fruit
59. Lychee
60. Macaroni in soup with Spam
61. Malatang
62. Mantou, especially if fried and dipped in sweetened condensed milk
63. Mapo Tofu
64. Mock meat
65. Mooncake (bonus points for the snow-skin variety)
66. Nor mai gai (chicken and sticky rice in lotus leaf)
67. Pan-fried jiaozi
68. Peking duck
69. Pineapple bun
70. Prawn crackers
71. Pu’er tea
72. Rambutan
73. Red bean in dessert form
74. Red bayberry
75. Red cooked pork
76. Roast pigeon
77. Rose tea
78. Roujiamo
79. Scallion pancake
80. Shaved ice dessert
81. Sesame chicken
82. Sichuan pepper in any dish
83. Sichuan preserved vegetable (zhacai)
84. Silken tofu
85. Soy milk, freshly made
86. Steamed egg custard
87. Stinky tofu
88. Sugar cane juice
89. Sweet and sour pork, chicken, or shrimp
90. Taro
91. Tea eggs
92. Tea-smoked duck
93. Turnip cake (law bok gau)
94. Twice-cooked pork
95. Water chestnut cake (mati gau)
96. Wonton noodle soup
97. Wood ear
98. Xiaolongbao (soup dumplings)
99. Yuanyang (half coffee, half tea, Hong Kong style)
100. Yunnan goat cheese

85/100.  That’s a little more like it.

Taken from here:

Here’s what I want you to do:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Only 55.  Somewhat disappointing.

Hi George!

We’re the creators of the site Thisiswhyyourefat.com –
we celebrate over the top food on our site (and have been
covered by The New York Times, CNN, The Today Show and
more!).

We are currently writing the book version of our site for
Harper Collins and would like to feature your amazing Krispy
Kreme Milkshake images and recipe with credit given to you.

Is this something we could get your okay on?

All contributors to the book will be named and have their
creations in print, and it will likely bring even more
attention to you or your blog or Flickr account!

If you’d like to be a part of the book version of our
site, we would need images to be as hi-res as possible, so
could you send us images as large as possible? That and a
recipe/ingredient list (if there is one) would be amazing!

Hope we can work with you and feature this killer thing in
our book!

Talk soon,

Jessica Amason & Richard Blakeley

Wow.  I got in contact with them and sent them full-res copies of the photo.  If they DO decide to use it, it’ll be kinda cool to see a picture that I took in a published book!  It’s actually kind of exciting.  Though, I’ll be first to admit, it’s not one of my best food pictures.  But at least this validates all those times I pull out the camera when sitting down to eat.

Want to see the picture?  Go here:

It’s very simple.

You download the IE8 Blocker Toolkit, I come rickroll your children until they develop irreversible mental instability.

Consider yourself warned.

Technorati Profile

From a Norwegian article:

Microsoft recommends end users that are browsing the web with Internet Explorer 6 to upgrade today to benefit from numerous improvements including security features and usability enhancements.

Interoperability is key to enabling developers to continue to create great user experiences on the web. Our commitment to the technical community continues with our significant investment in Internet Explorer 8.

We continue to believe in the importance of supporting the end users and encourage the technical community to work with us in securing a good transition for the users that today are using IE6.

Hope that helps

Looks like Steve Ballmer is a brother for the cause.  Well, more like special consultant.

Here are other cause-related links:

Browse Sad – make your site sad for all those under-privileged IE6ers.
#IE6 – see what Twitterers are saying about IE6.

Coming soon – how to do your part, as both a developer and a user.

We hereby declare war on Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, also known as “IE6″. Our people have been suppressed under your tyrannical rule for the previous 8 years, and still many of our more ignorant and incompetent brothers are deceived by your aging technology. It is our determination that we can no longer withstand your oppressive hold on our people, forcing our developers to tirelessly accommodate for your lack of adherence to even the most basic of CSS2 standards.

Your crimes will not go unforgiven, plaguing us with diseases such as the double margin bug and your inability to handle multiple CSS classes. While your successors have marginally improved on your shortfalls, you and your governing power, Microsoft, have been unwilling to relinquish your market share grasp by ignoring the repeated requests to replace you through a required upgrade via Windows Update.

Such crimes against humanity will not go unpunished, and it is far more than a guarantee that once we, as a collective whole, have achieved independence from * html { }, you will be cast judgment by a consortium of your peers (Mozilla, Safari, Google) to an undetermined fate worse than uninstall.

Any terms of your surrender are dependent on the validity of your successors. Though our intentions are strong and our determination stronger, we inevitably harbor mentally incompetent users who are still brainwashed by your default installation schemes and continue to pine after your family of products. However, there will be no negotiation – your surrender must be absolute. You must relinquish all market share.

Our faith is in proper object model rendering and the Acid3 test. Our victory is thereby inevitable.

Signed on this 16th day of March in the year 2009,
Every person who has ever opened a web page in a web browser

I’m taking a little break to write something that doesn’t end in semi-colons! Here’s my interesting fact for the day: Did you know that Sharepoint has a Javascript stack that you can chain on to run functions on the body tag’s onload called _spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames? A simple JavaScript call to _spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push(‘FunctionName’); attaches your function to load on page load. Amazing.

I’ve been at work far too long.

He likes to come talk to me when he sees me. It doesn’t matter if I’m running out the door or in mid-sentence with someone else, he’ll just start talking.

I can tolerate that. I’ll attribute it to a lifetime of social ineptitude. I can’t expect everyone to develop social skills at a realistic rate. That point, I’ve conceded.

But it’s the same conversation over and over again. Not merely the same topic, but it’s literally like dejavu each and every time. Here’s what happens:

Him: “Hey man, how are you doing? What are you up to?”
Me: “Not much, same ol’ same ol’.”
Him: “Alright. Cool, man. Are you in school or something?”
Me: “Nope, I’m working.”
Him: “Oh, for [a guy's name he gets wrong every time]?”
Me: “Nope, I don’t work for him. I work at an IT firm.”
Him: “That’s cool. What do you do there?”
Me: “I develop software applications.”
Him: [confused look] “Okay. It’s like we never get to talk, man, I feel like I don’t really get a chance to know you.”
Me: “Uh, I have to go.”

Now, this conversation wouldn’t be so bad if it’s like the first time he’s really talked to me or something. But this conversation has repeated itself (almost word for word) no less than 5 times already. I’m thinking, man, if you really cared, you would remember who I am and what I do. But obviously you don’t.

I should really just start making different stuff up each time.

“Oh, I’m a professional chair stacker. I engineer the most efficient ways to stack chairs.”

Join “Chinese Southern Belles” Natalie and Margaret Keng for a fun, palate-pleasing course celebrating food, family and culture. This mother/daughter team combines Chinese and Southern heritage and perspectives to present this unique course on Asian cuisine in the South. Class includes: 1) An Asian grocery store fieldtrip and tour where you’ll learn to navigate Asian vegetables, meats, spices, noodles and more. 2) An interactive classroom session exploring the connection between Asian food, culture, and history; cooking strategies; and kitchen pointers. (While this is not a cooking class, samples of popular food items, recipe ideas, cookware, and creative shortcuts will be covered.) 3) A teaching tasting at a local restaurant where you’ll learn to order authentic dishes that may not be listed on the American menu.

Awesome.  Simply awesome.

By far the most commented post on this entire blog is my rant about Tuscani Pasta.  I even have my own I’m-the-smartest-person-on-the-internet comment thread argument in there.  It’s quite amazing.

So I only feel obligated to report that Pizza Hut is BACK.  Apparently pretending to deceive New Yorkers wasn’t nearly shameful enough; this is a population who heart large flat pizzas.  No, the Pizza Hut marketing gang knows they have to step it up.  So they went to Italy.  Or so they make you believe.  The new victims to Pizza Hut’s palate-shocking pastas all sound pretty Italian.  They even speak Italian!  They really shelled out the bucks for this one.

Only $14.99 gets you this “vivacious” pasta.

I can’t wait to take frozen Costco lasagna to Italy and completely blow their minds.