Out of Pod Experience

I have learned something wonderful tonight and want to share it with all my friends. Campbell's makes a Healthy Choice Chunky soup called "Grilled Chicken & Sausage Gumbo". By itself it is bland, but if you add a few dashes of Tabasco sauce to it you easily have a good meal. It taste like the gumbo and jambalaya I have to pay $10-15+ for any place else. For $1.50 a can I am certainly going to be buying more of this!

I have no idea what either of those foods are.

And I still have no idea what those foods actually are. They sound messy though.

I've heard of both but then I used to watch cooking shows on the tele almost exclusively.

Never tried either though.

Gumbo is a heavily seasoned meaty soup thickened so much you can call it and even serve it as a stew (sometimes on rice).
Jambalaya is a slightly different version of Spanish paellas, so basically a (usually meaty) risotto with less rice and less creamy stuff but a lot more everything else.
I personally like to make something between a risotto and a jambalaya in terms of spice content and rice-to-other ratios.

i like both quite a bit.

but not out of a can. lol. canned soup is actually, more often than not, not very good for you at all. not as healthy as the marketing teams would have you believe.

Grab a Jambalaya recipe and try it - its kinda simple enough it pretty much makes itself and most recipes are good eating.

You'll like it.

That's for jambalaya. The rice is an optional side-dish for gumbo, not an ingredient.

As for how long do you cook it, the key is constant tasting, and you stop when you're happy with the results.
From the moment you start the "simmer mode", it could take under half an hour, or it could take more than a whole hour.
It depends a lot on how much moisture was in it to begin with and how high your "slow boil" heat really was, and of course, on just how thick you want it and how much of the thickening agents you can stand to use (you really DO NOT want a lot of undercooked roux, so ffs, don't add more near the end if you want it thicker, just simmer some more to get out some moisture instead, even if that means other stuff goes a bit mooshier).

Oh, and by the way, the roux is optional as far as the thickness goes (it's more in there for the added brown than thickness, and you can even skip it altogether, might as well just use butter instead if you like a more fatty flavour), you can just use more okra and/or powdered filè leaves (a.k.a. "american bay leaf" in some countries, where you can even get it at all - very hard to come by in Romania, for instance, and not really that much of a fan of it anyway).
There's lots of gumbos with just one instead of all three thickeners. I'd personally say the okra is the only actual key ingredient in the type of gumbo I personally like, with a bit of roux maybe (but with butter instead of oil), skipping the filè altogether. Then again, that's just a personal preference (I also skip the sausage and use just chicken meat).

It's a soup for the liquid intolerant