At long last, tonight was gumbo night. This meant I spent a good portion of the day fretting about what was going to happen.

I was also worried because cooking gumbo also meant I was experimenting on my family.

The first catch in the plan, though, was that She Who Must Be Obeyed decided to make chocolate candy right before I’d planned to start cooking. This pushed the entire process back and hour, but did leave us with chocolate for dessert.

After that I started the long process of cutting, chopping, and doing my best to keep all my fingers. (I have a couple odd skin cuts on my right index finger I don’t know how I got so apparently this was a near fail.) I was mostly worried because 1) I was using a kind of sausage we’d never tried before; 2) no one in the house except me had actually tried my gumbo before; and 3) managing the spice level was important or our oldest and youngest wouldn’t eat it.

The andouille style sausage turned out to be pretty good and the gumbo ended up being reasonably tasty. It wasn’t too spicy, but it passed the Gumbo Sweat Test, which means that by the end of the first bowl the spice hadn’t destroyed our taste buds but had sent us looking for handkerchiefs.

Everyone went for seconds, which is unusual, and we are looking forward to finishing it tomorrow after it’s had a chance to age.

The only problem is, I’ll probably have to do this again. I’m not sure if that means this was a failed experiment or not.