A shrimp and okra weekend

    
• That first photo might not be very appetizing. Do you know what it is? It's a chocolate- brown roux
in which have been cooked sliced onions, celery, and bell pepper (red, green, and yellow).
• The second photo shows steamer-cooked okra pods that have been cut into pieces so that they can
better release their magical "goo", as the Wikipedia article about okra calls it.

Okra Gumbo with steamed rice

    
• The meats I put in were turkey breast, pork sausage, and shrimp. I fried the turkey and sausage
before adding them to the thickened broth. The shrimp just cooked in the broth.
• The broth is chicken bouillon into which which I stirred the "roux goo" as a thickener.
The okra goo also has thickening power in the broth.

Shrimp and grits... and okra

Two products we wanted from the Asia Market grocery store last when we went to Tours the other day were frozen shrimp, a.k.a. prawns and in French crevettes, and either fresh or frozen okra (called gombos in French). We already had a bag of American grits in the pantry. Grits are a ground white corn mush (or porridge) that originated, apparently, in the U.S. South.

In coastal South Carolina, where shrimp and grits was a seasonal dish often served at brealfast, grits used to be called hominy. We used the term "hominy grits" in North Carolina. This porridge made from dried corn kernels is similar to Italian polenta, but with a slightly different texture because of the way the corn is processed and milled. On the internet I see the term gruau de maïs for the same kind of thing in French. (Gruau must be "gruel".)

We don't find okra in our local supermarkets very often, and we mainly find shrimp that are sold already cooked and
with the heads left on. In the Asian grocery stores in Blois and in Tours we can find both okra and
raw frozen queues de crevettes (shrimp "tails", which in English are not tails but bodies).
The shrimp are sold headless ("headed", étêtées) but with the shell left on.
I like to peel and cook shrimp myself rather than buy them pre-cooked.

For this version of shrimp and grits, I first "sweated" some chopped shallots (you can substitute onions) and garlic (4 cloves) in a mixture of butter and olive oil. Then I quickly sauteed the peeled and deveined shrimp.
I had already cooked the okra in a steamer pot.

This is a pan of the southern U.S. porridge called grits. I cooked these grits in watered-down shrimp broth that I made
from the shrimp shells with white wine, herbs, and spices. You can add grated cheese
to the grits if you want to, but I didn't want cheese in this recipe.

I added the cooked okra pods and a diced tomato to the pan with the shrimp and aromatic vegetables and
quickly sauteed everthing together. You can add more butter or olive oil at this point —
there's no other sauce for the grits. (Some recipes include a kind of gravy.)

Finally, serve the shrimp and okra over the cooked grits. Spoon it out onto plates or into bowls and serve it piping hot.
There's an interesting article about the history of "shrimp and grits" here. A North Carolina
restaurant chef played a big part in popularizing the dish back in the 1980s.
I spent my childhood in coastal North Carolina, but
we didn't eat shrimp with grits back then.

Tasha in rehab

Here's Natasha the Shetland sheepdog after her first night in her (borrowed) recovery corral.
She's been behaving admirably well as this rehabilitation starts.
She's staying calm and being perfectly cooperative.

Yesterday afternoon Walt took Tasha over to the local vets' office to have her leg bandage was taken off. He bought a
"cone of shame" for her to wear. It prevents her from using her teeth to pull the stitches out of her knee.
We've resumed taking two or even three short walks a day around the hamlet —
on a leash, following the surgeon's recommendations.

The drive to Tours

We went to Tours again yesterday and brought Tasha home. And we made it through the first night. Walt took her out on the leash twice late yesterday afternoon, and I took her out this morning. She's still limping pretty badly, but the vet says she needs a short walk two or three times a day. She is dozing in her living room corral right now. She was quiet in her loft corral overnight. Later today, we'll take her to the local veterinary clinic and have her bandage taken off.

1     2
Here are a few photos I snapped as we left the house and drove west toward the city of Tours.
These first two show the road we take from our hamlet down into the Cher river valley.

3     4
You can see that we had nice sunny weather. We had to deal with road works at a couple of points.
We drove through several villages along the way, but the road from Saint-Aignan
to Tours is a main two-lane highway that's wide and smooth.

5     6
There are many picturesque towns in the Cher river valley, like this one (Montrichard).
We looked at houses there and could have decided to live there back in 2002,
but we opted for a house in the country instead.

7     8
We drove down the Cher river valley all the way to Tours. It's a wide flat floodplain bordered by hills and bluffs.
We didn't have any trouble finding the clinique vétérinaire because we had done the same drive a day earlier.