My mother is an excellent cook, and when I grew up and out the house, I would always make sure to get back to wherever home was to partake and figure out how to bring food back with me. Thanks to Southwest, I could leave Mississippi at 8am with a duffel bag full of frozen food – sausages, greens, black eyed peas – and have that in my freezer in Chicago before noon.

But one thing my mother never did was teach me how to cook. I was amiable, but my childhood was spent outside the kitchen, except to consume vast quantities of food. She was old school, with the big Sunday dinner and the big pots of cabbage and greens to serve as sides through the week. But she never showed me how to do the alchemy she was so good at.

As I got into my 30s and 40s, Mom started to openly regret not teaching me how to cook. Over the years, I’ve cobbled together a decent cooking acumen so I won’t starve, and taken classes to learn more, but there were still those dishes Mom made that I had no idea how to make, even though I’ve eaten them thousands of times.

One such dish was her gumbo. Gumbo would take all day, and was made in a pot big enough to bathe a small child. She put andouille sausage, two sizes of shrimp, boiled chicken, and imitation crab meat in hers, and made sure to fix herself a small pot of okra for her, since Dad and I detested okra. When Mom made gumbo, it was an invitation for the entire family to come to our house, and I got to play host, which I learned I really enjoyed.

At any rate, recently, I’d gotten the urge to try to make my own gumbo. Because Momis Mom, she was unable to give me exacts. No “one cup of this, two tablespoons of that” here. “A scoop of this, and a pinch of that”, which, as you can imagine, aren’t measurements n the side of your Pyrex dish.

We tried last year, and..it was almost a disaster.

The key to a good gumbo is the roux, which is basically flour and fat mixed together. If you screw up the roux, or burn it, you have to toss everything and start over; there’s no coming back from that. And after a false start and an emergency call to my sister, we got it together and it came out pretty okay.

But fam, we did it again today, and I couldn’t WAIT to tell my mother about it. That we had two kinds of sausage. That our roux was good and not too thick and not too thin. That everything was done. And we put some butter and garlic on some French rolls and put em in the broiler for a minute until they were toasted and could be used to sop up the roux that somehow escaped our greedy mouths.

Mom was very happy to hear it, but she reminded me of a saying that has followed me since childhood.

“You know why your gumbo was good?”

“Why, Mom?”

“You put love in the pot.”

I hope y”all put love in your pots, too.