GREG JARRETT

                 RECIPE FOR DISASTER

 

I don’t know about you, but for some reason having snipers shoot at me makes me hungry.  Scud missiles fired at my hotel give me a sweet tooth, and by god walking through a forest littered with land mines makes me angry, and hungry.  Whats a war correspondent to do??  COOK, with whatever he can find!!!

These days people judge how good a kitchen and its primary cook are by the granite counter tops, the cherry cabinets and the all rock backsplash.  Not to mention the Viking range and the sub zero appliances.  When I was growing up you could pretty much tell you were going to get a good meal when you saw a Ball canning jar full of bacon drippings and a crock of sourdough starter on the counter next to the stove. 

My aunts and uncles loved to eat, and loved to cook.  My folks were no different with mom learning her skills in Arkansas and my dad in Texas.  There was enough of a variety of ethnic types in the relative picture to add some twists and turns and spice to many of the traditional recipes. 

When I was a kid we lived all over the U.S. following my dad and the on again off again aviation industry.  My mom usually managed or opened a restaurant wherever we lived, so I had  a built in job diving for pearls, (washing dishes), peeling spuds, and busing tables.  As I gained years I waited tables and tended bar.  Sometimes at special parties I did it all from cooking to bar tending to cleaning up.  Because of the itinerate nature of my parents business life we often cooked full meals on an open fire and used a camp oven for baking and a cast iron Dutch oven for everything else.  

When I grew into a young man and a news correspondent I learned that cooking skills helped a young man meet women, and a budding journalist make friends when there was no restaurant nearby.  What follows is a compilation of some of the recipes I stole from my family, and some I made up as I went along.  Attached to the recipes are tales of some occasions when I prepared these recipes and the cast of characters for whom I prepared them. 

Chapter one:  Cookin’ Cajun or, Sarajevo Soup.

 

In Sarajevo in the early 90’s most of us covering the war stayed in the Holiday Inn.  While this sounds pretty comfy you must be advised there was no electricity and no running water.  We had to carry water to flush the toilets, bathe, and drink, up the stairs in buckets.  The caste system was not based on color, age or gender, it was based on to which floor you were assigned.  I lived on the 8th floor.  Now while this seems pretty low on the totem pole let me say that there were distinct advantages to living up there.  The first, and most important was the fact that snipers on surrounding hills did not have as good a line of sight to my room as they did for lower floors.  Admittedly I still had to crawl around on the floor at night if I had a candle burning or a flashlight on, but I knew they had no angle on the bed.  I knew this because of the height of the bullet holes in the wall. 

 I spent hours ferrying buckets of water to the room to fill the tub.  I did not bathe in the tub, but sponge bathed every day and used the tub water to flush the toilet.  I had two cases of bottled water in the room to drink and brush my teeth with.  There was also the bottle of Johnny Walker Black of course, to keep my spirits up.  And, to calm me down when at bed time someone would open up with an AK-47 and spray the building just to keep us excited. 

 The TV center where we all worked was some miles away and we had to travel a road called sniper alley to get to and from the hotel and work every day.  For this purpose we had armored Land Rover defenders.  There were not always enough to go around so sometimes we had to take a “soft” car and zig zag back and forth hoping the snipers would not be good enough to hit us.  Imagine a small foreign car from the 80’s.  Looks like sardine cans hammered together with seat cushions thinner than a thirteen year old boys moustache.  Now imagine 6 semi intoxicated journalists madly driving at top speed, (35-40mph) jerking from side to side, singing to a tape deck blaring heavy metal.  OK, you got the picture.  You could punch a hole in one of these cars with an eraser fired with a rubber band. 

 The networks chipped in for fuel for the generator for the fridge at the hotel but it was limited in size.  Each network also had food brought in and each organization had a table and dinner time every night.  Obviously the vast majority of the meat and veggies was canned stuff as we could not keep fresh food from spoiling. There was also a small kitchen facility at the TV center that we sometimes used when we had to work late. 

There was a custom at my network, (ABC News) that those of us with culinary skills would take turns cooking meals for the whole crew.  The trick was getting fresh ingredients.  Two of our engineers were Indians from London who cooked some great curries.  He was from Northern India originally, and she was from the South so we got meat and veggie dishes.  When it was their turn to cook I was in heaven.

What now follows is the tale of one of my turns to cook.  I wanted to make genuine Cajun Chicken gumbo.  As you may understand a good gumbo needs fresh chicken, fresh onions, bell peppers, celery, and garlic not to mention flour, oil. Cayenne pepper, sausage,  and some other cool stuff I will tell you about in a minute.  We had the salt and pepper, and powdered garlic..but that was about it. 

Here is a little scene setter for you.  Sarajevo was the home base for the UN at the time.  The Bosnians had the place, but it was surrounded by Serbs.  You had to go through a gazillion checkpoints to get in our out.  Like as not some guy named Ratko or Drago would haul you out of the truck and push you around for a while.  I learned early to carry a few cartons of Marlboros, double A batteries, and beer with me when I went out.

In order to get my ingredients I would have to go to a Serb controlled town called Pale.  It was in the country and they actually had markets that sold stuff like veggies and such.    My hope was that the farms between Pale and Sarajevo could also supply some of the other stuff, like chicken and maybe spice.

Remember, this area had been home to the 1984 Olympics just less than a decade before.  Then it was known as, The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.  You could see how beautiful the place had been.  The evergreens, the villages that looked a lot like old storybook pictures of Swiss villages in the Alps.  The fact was, when you got close the effects of the war made you want to cry.  The poverty, and the obvious injury caused by flying shrapnel and lack of basic needs. 

 Pale had been a sleepy mountain village until Radovan Karadzic and others made it the headquarters for the Bosnian Serbs who fled nearby Sarajevo to set up government and barricade the city of Sarajevo.  Karadzic put his somewhat psycho daughter Sonja in charge of PR and when journalists went to Pale they had to work through her to file reports.  Did I mention there was only one phone you could use in town to file stories on?  Did I mention that Sonja or one of her people would listen and if you said anything bad about her dad you were cut off and got a talking to.  That talking to always made me hungry.  Then looking at Sonja always helped curb that appetite.  We called her the “dragon lady.” 

Time for a very quick, and admittedly simplistic  history lesson.  The international community ordered the area formerly known as Yugoslavia to break up and allow recognition of all the former ethnic groups who made up the various regions.  Karadzic and his buddies were against the secession, they wanted to hold the union together.  So when the Bosnians decided to take Sarajevo and the surrounding area to independence, a civil war broke out with Radovan and loyal Serbs in the region isolating Sarajevo which lay in a bowl surrounding by mountains.  Hence, Sarajevo became a shooting gallery with Pale as the headquarters for the shooters. 

The travels I took out of Sarajevo were usually with my shooter, (cameraman) Johnny, who always described himself as, a Northern Irish lad, the soundman was a former Rhodesian commando we will call “Ian” for the purposes of his anonymity and my future health. 

 Johnny would drive, I would right shotgun, and Ian would sit in back and mumble, grumble, and say very nasty things about the parentage of the guards at the checkpoints we seemed to run in to every 3 or 4 miles.  We always carried a few beers, lots of cartons of Marlboros, and double A batteries.  These things were the currency of the day. 

The reason given our producer for the trip was to file reports from Serb headquarters.  The real reason: shopping for fresh meat and produce, local beer, and some Slivovitz, a local plum brandy.  We also wanted to check on two twin sisters who had been employed by our network to work the Serb side of the story.  I think Johnny and Ian thought they had a chance.

Before we ever got to Pale we stopped at one of the Olympic villages just a few miles away to clear a checkpoint.  We discovered while there that the sisters had been “detained” in the ski lodge.  Johnny and Ian got all chivalrous on me and demanded the release of the girls.  Just so you have a picture of the ladies, they were dark haired, dark eyed lovelies who had slightly big hair like Tanya Tucker in the 70’s and smoked a good 3 packs of red label Marlboros a day.  Think about how hard it was to come up with those cigarettes. 

 Well, 3 hours later after WE had been detained in a woodshed for 2 hours we finally got out and the girls were gone.  Who knows what happened there. 

 Shopping time.  We had some of the main ingredients back in Sarajevo already.  Plenty of salt and pepper, also cayenne, celery seed, and garlic powder which I always carry wherever I go.  You see the main ingredients of almost any Cajun dish are celery, bell pepper, onion, and garlic.  Oddly, during the season bell type peppers are not that hard to find.  For some reason celery IS hard to find, and celery seed will lend the flavor.  Thanks to the UN we had plenty of rice so we didn’t need any of that.  I also had a jug of Tabasco sauce for extra flavor and some gumbo file, (sassafras leaves ground up)

Here is a list of the other stuff I needed:

Chicken (live cause there is no refrigeration)

Bell peppers or bell type peppers

Onion

Eggs

Cooking oil

Bacon if possible

Sausage..(polish type would do since I knew there was no andouille)

What I will do in the recipe that follows is adjust the ingredients for service to six people instead of the 16 I fed in Sarajevo.  I used 5 chickens and probably 4 pounds of sausage, you will not need that much.

So, after an interesting shopping trip that involved picking up the live chickens from a local farmer, and 3 cases of Yelen Pivo, (deer beer) in giant bottles from a roadside store, we started the drive back.  A tavern provided us with 2 bottles of plum brandy, and we had already started drinking warm beer which was disgusting.

My intention was to cook the gumbo at the TV center which had been built for the Olympics coverage a decade earlier.  We had a portable gas stove set up.  I remember the look I got when I carried the chickens by the work area.  The birds had their feet tied together and I carried them in squawking bundles.  I needed to get all the veggies ready and the roux made before I dealt with the chicken problem, which I knew had to be dealt with out back.  Most of the people I would be feeding thought chicken came from a plastic package in the refrigerated section of the store.  It was about 3 in the afternoon when the roux was ready, the onions chopped, the bell peppers diced, and the big pot of water was boiling. Chop, drain, dip, pluck, clean, butcher.  That is the order I was taught and that is the order in which it went.  One hour later it looked like I had been to the local supermarket with split breasts, legs, thighs, backs, all nice and seasoned with red pepper and garlic, and salt, browning in bacon grease. 

After it was all over and everyone was sitting around the table with wine, and heaving bowls of fresh gumbo one young American producer complimented me on the meal and said, “where did you find chicken in this town??..” This is when a few lightbulbs came on some began remembering me hauling live chickens around back…..

 

Here is your recipe to serve 6. 

1 large skillet (cast iron if possible)

1 large stew pot

1 medium sauce pan (cast iron is good, but whatever you make a sauce in)

1/2 cup flour(you may use less, you may use more)

3/4 cup vegetable oil (more or less)

Cayenne Pepper to taste ( probably less than a teaspoonful and add Tabasco if it’s not enough)

Salt and black pepper to taste

Gumbo file (a pinch on each bowl just before serving)

4-6 small eggs

4 slices of thick bacon

 4 thighs skin on

1 full breast quartered

4 drumsticks

(note: you can do boneless, skinless, or any variety you want, bone-in is the most flavorful)

 Two links of andouille or polska kilbasa whichever you can come up with

 2 cups of chicken stock

 2 medium yellow onions chopped

1 green bell pepper chopped

4 stalks of celery chopped

1 tablespoon chopped garlic

 Dust your well dried chicken with a little cayenne pepper, black pepper, and salt.  Just a sprinkle, a dusting.  Set aside. (I have invented a spice blend called "GJ Spice that replaces all but the salt)

In the cast iron skillet cook the bacon slowly, remove bacon and keep the heat on medium.

Brown your chicken in the drippings turning ‘til brown but not fully cooked.  Remove and set aside chicken.   Remove skillet from heat but leave drippings in it. 

Make your roux:

In saucepan heat oil over medium high heat.  Do not burn..but let it get HOT.  Add a tablespoon of flour at a time and whisk it in ‘til its starts to get thick and you have to push it from side to side with a wooden spoon. 

If you let this burn I will taste burnt, so don’t burn it,  Reduce heat to medium low and push it around ‘til it is almost as brown as a Hershey bar or you get scared. 

There are some good articles on making Cajun roux, you can google “how to make a Cajun roux”

Put the roux in the cast iron skillet returning it to the medium hat.

 Add onions and if needed add some oil (a teaspoon at a time) to help thin the mixture to brown and not burn. 

Note: onions must clarify before adding the garlic next.  An old Cajun lady taught me that not clarifying the onions first leads to indigestion.  After garlic has cooked for a minute or two add the bell pepper, when they wilt add the celery.

At this point put the chicken in the stew pot, add the wilted veggies, add the chicken stock.  Add the sausage, and make sure there is about 3 inches of stock over the top of the chicken.  Bring to a boil, reduce to simmer and cook for 1-1 and a half hours. 

20 minutes before serving break the eggs gently into the mixture.  The poaching eggs absorb flavor and are considered good luck.

Taste this occasionally to see if it needs more salt, or more cayenne.  You may want to add up to a tablespoon full of salt  while cooking depending on your taste.  Careful on the cayenne. 

Put a few spoons full of rice in a large bowl.  Cover with some pieces of chicken and sausage and an egg.  Spoon some of the juice and veggies over it, and add a pinch of file.  Tabasco is good for added flavor and heat if you need it. 

So good it makes getting shot at not such a bad deal.