Nothin' Says Lovin'

So, I've been cooking. Made a pot roast Wednesday. Made the sausage/cabbage/beer thing last night. That totally rocked, btw. I sauteed some onions & sliced carrots, added fresh cabbage, poured half a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale on it, a coupla spoonfuls of apple cider vinegar & some apple cider, sliced some kielbasa & beef smoked sausage & just let it simmer for awhile. I was worried that the vinegar would be too vinegary, but it added this fantastic tartness to the cabbage instead that offset the sweetness of the carmelized onions & carrots & regular apple cider. It turned into flavor instead of remaining vinegar. So tonight, I had some pesto-stuffed tortellini from Trader Joe's, & some shrimp. I decided I was going to make a bechamel sauce.

Now, this is really my biggest shame. I cannot make sauces or gravies. I mean, here I am, one half Cajun & one half Tennessee dirt farmer & I cannot make a gravy to save my life. I have to settle for pre-made cornstarch preservative-laden things that come from envelopes & jars. And I don't like the jarred alfredo sauces - they just taste kind of blegh. My cooking is sort of a fusion between Southeastern & new Western... mainly because stir fry is easier than say, gumbo.

Now, roux is basically a fat and a starch, slowly cooked over an even heat, used as a thickening base for almost every kind of gravy or cream sauce known to mankind. It's just butter and flour. Should be easy. It's not. There's a definite art to making roux.

So, I melt some butter & let the water cook out of it. I added flour & began to stir. Much to my utter amazement, it actually turned into roux. I was flabbergasted. By the gods, it actually went through the stages - first it was just flour in butter. I stirred to coat all those flour molecules with fat molecules and it became a grainy white sauce. I let it simmer for about thirty seconds, stirred it and watched as it began to turn golden, and slightly less grainy. I could actually taste that slightly toasted, nutty flavor flour is supposed to get when it is made into a roux. I was like, holy crap, it's actually working! So I added minced garlic & pepper & some nutmeg & the flavor came alive. Then I added milk & all that lovely golden creamy sauce turned into gray lumpy mush. However, I began whisking it like an absolute fiend, breaking up all the oatmeal-looking lumps as I brought it to a boil & it smoothed out into, well, bechamel sauce. Then I turned my attention to the shrimp & things went horribly, horribly wrong. That smooth, creamy, garlicky sauce turned into pancake batter. Smooth pancake batter, but extremely thick pancake batter. Argh. And ew. So I tossed half the shrimp in, plopped a blob of it on my tortellini & ate it anyway. Now I feel like I am full of grade-school paste. Garlicky, shrimpy paste. It tasted really good, and the texture wasn't gritty or lumpy or greasy, it was just thick and kind of gooey. It didn't really spread over the pasta so much as sit on top of it until the weight made it sink through the center of the pasta like a fat kid in a ball bin at McDonald's.

Eventually, I will get the hang of it. Both my parents were Southern, roux should run in my veins instead of blood!