God Bless the GBS!

We had a very gung-ho babysitter (GBS) the past 2 days. She told Drew how much she loved cooking and he told her about the upcoming cooking camp he's signed up for, and they decided to look up a recipe, buy the ingredients, and cook it up the next day. He suggested gumbo - he wanted to cook that on the Boy Scout camping trip, but we'd dissuaded him from that. I mean, it's GUMBO...it requires a ROUX...do you know how Dean slaves over his ROUX to get it just right? It's hours of standing and stirring and that's before you even put all the SEAFOOD in! (You can see here I was thinking about how much this shopping trip would cost and would it be edible afterwards.)

Well, I forgot to ban the gumbo when I left for work this morning, so when I walk in this afternoon, the house smells like bacon and onions. I mean, it's not bad, just different. They're so proud of the "gumbo," which GBS prefers to call "white chili." She found the recipe on FoodNetwork.com and it looked pretty easy, so off they went to buy potatoes, frozen shrimp (you need a microscope), bacon, onions, canned clams, and half-and-half. GBS says Drew did most of the work; she just chopped onions and supervised. They even cooked rice!

So I had it for dinner......it was pretty good! I did have to pick out pieces of bacon to bite off the meat and lay the fat aside, because they didn't cook it very much and there was quite a bit of fat left. And I'm really worried about how many calories I ate because the main ingredient was half-and-half, and it really was WHITE soup! And I asked Drew what the stringy greenish things were - leeks? - and he told me those were the clams.....huh???? I did find a few sea monkeys, er...I mean shrimplings, in my bowl, but it was mostly potatoes.

So overall, it was tasty if a bit unhealthy, I didn't have to cook it, Drew was proud of it, and I haven't run to the bathroom yet with cramps, so I deem it a success. Thanks, GBS!