catfish étouffée.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Hmm, I have no idea when this post is from; it was a Draft, and then I published it just now, and now its lost its "originally written" date.

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ORIGINAL POST: No time for inspired commentary, but wanted to get some pictures and recipe notes up: above, test kitchen muffin tasting (*blushes*); middle, my "peanut butter" roux; below, resulting catfish étouffée.

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Étouffée (from here on out tilde-less). When I first started cooking from scratch, back around 1990, some of the first things I cooked were what we non-Louisiana dwellers have come to think of as "Creole and Cajun food". In 1990, "Cajun cooking" had just ridden an improbable decade-long wave of huge trendiness in America, and it was nearly impossible to find an American cookbook without a jambalaya or red beans & rice or shrimp Creole recipe (here's a brief bit by Chuck Taggart about that whole phenomenon, and here's something more academic). I know jambalaya was one of the first delicious things I cooked at home.
























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catfish etoufee.

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1 tbsp paprika
1 tbsp salt
1 tbsp garlic powder
1 tbsp black pepper
2 tsp onion powder
2 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tbsp dried thyme

6 tbsp butter
1/2 cup flour

3 stalks celery, sliced
1 medium onion, sliced
1 bell pepper, seeded and chopped (optional)
3 cloves garlic

1 can tomatoes
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tbsp Tabasco sauce, or more, to taste
1 bottle dark beer (not stout, but something dark)
2 bay leaves

600gr catfish, cut into bite-size pieces
a mess o' scallion greens