Chicken and Smoked Sausage Gumbo

Our city had some uncharacteristically crummy winter weather last weekend, which was all the motivation we needed to stay in and cook up some Chicken and Sausage Gumbo. This recipe comes from one of our favorite celebrity chefs, John Besh. You may remember Chef Besh from last week's king cake, and this is one of our other favorites from his NOLA cooking bible, My New Orleans.

This is another one of those low-maintenance, leisurely meals, so if you're looking for something quick, click elsewhere! The sense of satisfaction you'll get from the first spoonful, however, is worth it. Your guests will rave about its rich, smoky flavor and plentiful carnage - and by the way, invite a crowd, because this recipe serves 10-12 hungry people.

If you're intimidated by Besh's use of a cut whole chicken in this recipe, don't be. For one thing, the gumbo cooks so long that the meat falls directly off the bone - yeah, we had visions of our guests fishing drippy drumsticks out of the stock pot, too! And if you're put off by the thought of portioning a whole chicken, just go buy a package of breasts, a package of thighs, and a package of legs.

The first step is to prepare a roux, which, for the uninitiated, is an oil and flour mixture that forms the silky basis for many rich Cajun dishes. A cup of oil and a cup of all-purpose flour are combined in a very large, heavy stock pot and are whisked continuously for 15 minutes over medium-high to high heat.

Your roux will take on a luxurious dark brown color as it's heated. If at any point in your whisking the mixture begins to smell burned, move immediately to the next step, which is to add 2 large, diced onions and dial the heat back to medium low for 10 minutes. The onions will introduce some moisture back into the roux, which, along with the reduced temperatures, will keep it from scorching.

While the onions are simmering in the roux, the chicken can be seasoned. Besh recommends his signature blend of Cajun spices, which we make periodically and store in an airtight container in our pantry. If you don't have time to blend these, or aren't sure if you like them, some Tony Chachere's or any other bottled Cajun spice mixture will work just fine.

Sprinkle the chicken with your choice of spices and incorporate it into the roux, allowing each piece of chicken to brown along the bottom of the pot.

Next, add the smoked sausage, celery, bell

peppers, tomatoes, and garlic. Allow those flavors to meld for 3 minutes before adding the thyme, chicken stock, and bay leaves. (The photo at left is pre-chicken stock.) Raise the heat and bring everything to a boil, then reduce the heat to medium low and allow the gumbo to simmer for 45 minutes.

As the gumbo cooks, bits of the chicken skin will begin to float to the surface. No one wants to eat soggy chicken skin (well, no one we know, at least!), so drag your spoon through the mixture periodically, fishing out the fat and skin.

When the 45 minutes is up, you can incorporate the andouille, okra, and Worchestershire sauce. Andouille isn't something that most stores around the country keep stocked, so any sort of smoked or pre-cooked pork sausage should suffice.

Once those ingredients are incorporated, more seasoning is added - because if there's one thing good Cajuns do, it's add flavor! (Now do you understand why we're such flavor snobs when we review dishes?)

After the seasoning is added, the gumbo must simmer for another 45 minutes. (It can go even longer than that if you need it to.) While you're waiting, it's a good time to prepare the rice over which you're going to serve your wonderful feast. Besh offers his own special recipe for Basic White Rice in his book, but any long grain white rice will work just fine.

Get a load of that gumbo, will you? We dare you to eat just one bowl, it's that good. Perfect for a rainy (or snowy) weekend day, and it should yield some great lunch leftovers, too!

Usually we don't offer the Yuppie Test Kitchen Favorites crown to dishes that take a long time to prepare, but for this masterpiece we're comfortable making an exception. The truth is, as much as we love quick and easy cooking, we love plain old cooking even more, and learning from the masters is sometimes worth a little extra effort.

We suppose you could make a quick "gumbo" somehow, or let one simmer all day in a crock pot, but you probably wouldn't be able to taste the love that comes with a good roux.

Sausage, Apple, and Fennel Corn Bread Dressing

A major factor in how we select recipes for any holiday is how much maintenance they require. (We suspect the same is true for many of you!) After all, when you're already planning to spend several hours in the kitchen, why commit yourself to more?

This year, though, we wondered whether we'd been unfairly limiting ourselves all this time. Maybe, by taking the term "labor of love" a little more literally, we could reap greater culinary rewards.

Enter Sausage, Apple, and Fennel Corn Bread Dressing (Cooking Light, 2006). This recipe has a record-setting 22 ingredients, a 4-star reader rating, and a Test Kitchen Guarantee. Surely it had to be worth the extra effort, right? With gusto, we accepted the challenge.

Step 1 was a reasonably simple undertaking: make corn bread. No frills, very simple cornbread. This step took about 5 minutes to assemble, 16 minutes to bake, and 5 minutes worth of cooling time. You could save yourself that time by buying pre-made corn bread from your local bakery; however, if you're looking for ways to make the holidays healthier, doing so leaves you with less control over fat and calories.

While baking the cornbread, it's possible to get a jump-start on preparing the sausage mixture. You'll notice from our ingredient line-up that we'd chopped all of our produce up the night before. It's not necessary to do so, especially since you'll want something to do while that cornbread is cooling, but we can vouch for the fact that all of the pre-chopped ingredients withstood 16 hours in the fridge.

Next, in stages, our produce was added to a non-stick pan and sauteed in olive oil. This process took about 20 minutes and our persistence paid off in the form of pleasant aromas in our kitchen! Once the sautee was completed, the mixture was cooled to room temperature before moving on.

While we waited for our sausage mixture to cool, we went ahead and crumbled the cornbread into a large bowl. It was similar to playing with one of those squeezable stress balls that were popular years ago - a nice little stress reliever for holiday season! Then we incorporated the sausage mixture, the broth, and eggs, and spread everything out into a 9x13 baking dish. The dish went into our preheated oven for 50 minutes - time we used to whip up some mashed potatoes and carve up our turkey!

Because we needed to farm out our baking dish for another tasty treat, we piled our finished dressing into another serving bowl, shown at left. To keep it warm, we covered the bowl with aluminum foil and stashed it in the microwave. Seriously, if you ever find yourself taking direction from a recipe to "keep [something] warm", look no further than that small, insulated space in your kitchen - it is perfect!

Now for the verdict: This stuffing is...good. Not great, nowhere close to what mom used to make, but a good, solid alternative. Maybe we'd gotten ourselves amped up for the fruits of our long and distinguished labors, but we were mostly underwhelmed. With strong ingredients like fennel involved, we expected to produce a symphony of flavors and ended up tapping out "Chopsticks" instead.

One reviewer on Cooking Light's website added dried cranberries, which we think might have broken up the beige blandness. Some almonds or walnuts might also provide another layer of texture and flavor. Something was just missing - so let us know if you find it!

Italian Sausage with Arrabbiata Sauce and Polenta

We're reaching back into the treasure trove of Williams-Sonoma tonight with an entrée: Italian Sausage with Arrabbiata Sauce and Polenta.

The recipe has two distinct phases: making the polenta and making everything else. The focus on grains is for good reason, because, as it turns out, real, Italian-style polenta is hard to make! The preparation requires 35 to 40 minutes and constant stirring. Unless you want to check "make honest-to-goodness polenta" off your bucket list or are looking for a good arm workout, we suggest substituting the 5-minute variety. Doing so will cut your cooking time by more than half and, if our experience is any indication, you won't miss a thing!

The next step is browning the sausage, which is a simple task. To avoid crowding our sausage links, we browned 4 at a time for 10 minutes (for a total of 8 links, or 20 minutes cooking time). This left a brown, spotty coating on the bottom of our pan, but not to worry if this happens to you - the next step will take care of the clean-up.

After moving the browned sausages to a plate, it's time to sautee the veggies! This recipe employs some of the more ubiquitous (and, thus, lower cost) vegetables in your produce section: onions and green bell peppers. The sautee is performed at a medium heat for 10 minutes, and the release of water from the vegetables makes short work of deglazing the pan.

In goes the arrabbiata sauce and the sausage, and together they simmer for another 10 minutes. (You'll notice from our ingredient line-up that we opted to use our own favorite bottled sauce, rather than make an extra trip to W-S.) Once the flavors have melded, remove the pan from the heat and serve on a bed of whichever polenta you decide to concoct.

This recipe was phenomenal, and a great departure from everyday Italian pasta dishes. Furthermore, there's a lot of room to make this dish healthier by 86-ing the cheese or the butter from the polenta or using chicken sausage.

Have you tried this dish? Tell us what you think in the comments!

Pasta Stackup with Chicken Sausage

Get a load of this hot mess:

This is what happened when we attempted the Pasta Stackup with Chicken Sausage recipe from Better Homes and Gardens. No you're right, it's not terrible, but now take a peek at how it's supposed to look. So plump and whimsical and fresh, isn't it? And ours? Not so much.

On the bright side, it does taste good, and they're right, it did only take the advertised 25 minutes to prepare, but we're left wondering where in those 4 simple steps we managed to go wrong. (Personally, I think it's the tomatoes we bought.)

We'd recommend this dish with a couple of caveats:

• Instead of slicing the sausage lengthwise in half, consider thirds or quarters instead. The results will be more easily stackable and less wobbly.
• Make sure that everyone you're preparing this for will be present and ready to eat when it comes time to serve. If your family runs on varied work and school schedules and you're planning to make up a plate for someone to enjoy later, you may uncover it to find it a little...wilty.