Wow….only eight days left! I almost can’t believe it. Although we don’t plan to change the way we eat very much (especially at home) it will be nice to have a little less pressure on me to carry this out perfectly. This is on my mind after the second time in a week that a recipe I planned to make had to come to a screeching halt due to rule-breaking ingredients. I guess that’s what happens when I pull from my “pre-100 day” catalog of recipes. I have really been craving some flavors from New Orleans (my in-laws live in The Big Easy so we’ve been spoiled with their yummy cuisine on many occasions). So with a few substitutions in mind I thought I would be able to pull together my husband’s aunt’s gumbo recipe.

Originally I was thinking that I would just sub whole-wheat flour for white flour when I made the roux. And even though I love to have sausage in our gumbo I would just have to settle with leaving it out since we recently discovered our source for local sausage uses sugar. Then I went searching at Earth Fare for a can of “stewed tomatoes” which as it turns out definitely has more than five ingredients. And Earth Fare said they didn’t have any fresh crabmeat on hand, and they don’t carry crabmeat in a can because it doesn’t meet their requirements (and if an entire grocery store chain deems something is “bad” would I want to eat it anyway?). I’d already bought some of the other ingredients by this point so I thought maybe I could make my own stewed tomatoes. But, then what about the crab? And at what point do I stop jumping through hoops just to make one damn recipe?! Continue Reading »