I think I am going to start blogging family recipes that I have been able to duplicate. None before have every been written down. I after cooking and playing with ingredients duplicated based on tast what I ate as a child.  Not many of them are written down. Those that are are mostly vague mostly on proportions of ingredients.  So I had to figure it out. Gumbo took me about 8 times to get right but we will get into gumbo in a later post.

My goal is to document and share theses recipes with as many people as possible to show what real Cajun cooking is like. There have been many misconceptions of Cajun cooking. People think Cajun means spicy this is a misconception as you will see with this recipe. Cajun food is very simple and had to be because families were very poor and lacked resources to make complicated meals. Also people misunderstand and think Creole meals are Cajun meals. While they have their similarities. Cajun meals are much simpler.  You can read more about this here.  http://www.louisianatravel.com/articles/cajun-vs-creole-food-what-difference

One saying is make it your own so I added my spin to her shrimp stew. I use some white wine when saying the vegetables. Yes she said that's not cajun and laughed. :) My family has a saying "Make it your own" so I did.

Granny's Shrimp Stew: 

Ingredients:

1. 2 Pounds Shrimp
2. 1 large sweet onion
3. ¼ cup of Italian parsley
4. 2 cloves garlic
5. 1 stalk of celery
6. ¾ cup of flower
7. ¾ cup of oil
8. 6 table spoons of white wine
9. 7 cups of shrimp stock
10. Tony Chachere's creole seasoning tm and salt to taste “don’t make it hot you only need a slight hint of the spice.”

Start by pealing the shrimp set aside the shells and refrigerate the shrimp tell ready to add.

Take the shrimp shells add it to 8 cups of water in a pot. Note this will cook down. Add shells to water and boil for at least 30 min.

While the stock is being made cut the vegetables and set aside. They will ned to be diced.. I use a pampered chef chopper.

Once chopped add the vegetables into a skillet with a little bit of olive oil to sauté. Sauté for about 5 min I season a tad during this. Then add the dry coking white wine and continue to sauté while you are making the roux at the same time.

You want the roux to be blond about 5 min on medium low heat just enough to break down the flour.

When you get to the point you like it remove from heat and add the vegetables to the roux. Note because the vegetables are already hot this will NOT stop the roux from cooking so you need to be quick.

Add the roux vegetable mixture to a large pot.

Poor the shrimp stock into the pot also and mix tell fully blended.

Reduce heat to a simmer and cover; Stir every 5 or so min to prevent burning for an hour. You want the liquid to be a thin to mid grave consistency. Add seasoning to taste. It should not be a spicy flavor. It needs to be just seasoned right.

I put the shrimp shells back into the other pot and add water to have it ready if I need to add more liquid..

While it I simmering cut the chop up shrimp into smaller pieces. If medium to large shrimp. You will add this at the last 15 min of cooking.. 30 min before the end of the simmering start making your rice.

Serve and garnish with a spring of parsley “bon appetite”