Going Andouilless

The Super came home from a very long day at work (he was up with the bug at about five, and because he's apparently sharpest in the ay-em he went on in to the office early)—he came home and looked in the skillet and said, "Where's the sausage in that gumbo?" That's right: I had no andouille, but nevertheless I attempted to make gumbo in an effort to use up some of the huge bag of okra a colleague of the Super's gave us. I didn't even have any hot sauce, so all the heat is the high-pitched heat of ground cayenne. It was pretty darn good last night (I'm told—I've been too stuffed up to taste much), and it's pretty good warmed up with a pile of rice for breakfast, too. I basically used this recipe from Epicurious, cooking the roux at a lower temperature for much longer than indicated.

My dad made the wooden spoon, must've been twelve or fifteen years ago.

The bug has been talk-talk-talking the last couple days, and it really seems as if she's trying to tell us something very serious and complex: she goes off on these long monologues, strings of sentencelike sounds, on and on, expecially when she and I are lying in the hammock looking up at the deep blue fall sky. She hasn't learned that it's easier to make speech sounds if you clear your mouth of drool first, so as she talks her mouth recalls the exploded laundry room in Mister Roberts. She's also been waking up at night every three hours on the dot to be fed. My pat explanation, as usual, is "growth spurt." She's half a year old today.