What's the most complicated meal you've ever prepared?

[solost]

@pulykamell

Yeah, my suggestion for allspice was from your recent thread on making award-winning chili (where you do say you used it, too):

Ah yes, so I did. That was the day of the NFC Championship game the Lions lost, so my memory of that day was a bit scrambled from the awful loss (and a beverage or two)

@pulykamell

I checked around, and I don’t see myself suggesting using it for gumbo.

I just searched around a bit and couldn’t find it either, but you did post several gumbo recipes in a thread awhile back. One of them was a ‘gumbo with greens’ recipe that had allspice as an ingredient. I found a reference I also made to it in this thread from Sept. '22, so it predates this:

Advice on BBQing an 8 lb ribeye roast?

It’s good in beef stews. Interesting. In another food thread here, someone (may even have been you) posted a link to an older Beef Stroganoff recipe that didn’t use mushrooms but did include allspice and mustard. I tried making it and I found that allspice (mustard too, but not as much) works very well with beef & sauce type dishes. A gumbo with greens recipe you gave me included allspice, and now I add allspice to my gumbos routinely. It pairs really nicely with the flavor of a well-browned…

Anyway, I will have to do some more searching, because that gumbo with greens recipe was good.

ETA: found it!

Jambalaya recipe

BTW, here’s a nice Cajun brown jambalaya recipe. Have a nice stroll through that website. It has served me well for … oh … at least a decade. I want to say closer to twenty years, though. (ETA: Yeah, it looks like the domain has existed since 1997, and I’m pretty sure I’ve been cooking from it since c. 2000/2001.) Donald Link’s book “Real Cajun: Rustic Home Cooking from Donald Link’s Louisiana” is also a nice resource. He writes: “In my opinion, there are two types of jambalaya – Cajun and Cre…

Here’s the ‘gumbo with greens’ recipe leading from that link (actually called GUMBO Z’HERBES). It only calls for a grand total of a mere 2 allspice berries, yet it was my inspiration to experiment with allspice in gumbo.