Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

By popular request, here’s my recipe for cream gravy:

2 tablespoons fat (may use pan drippings, butter, bacon grease, etc. or any combination of the above)
2 tablespoons flour
2 cups milk
salt to taste
fresh-ground black pepper to taste

Melt 2 tablespoons of fat in a pan. Add the flour and stir well. The mixture will become a thick paste (a.k.a a roux). Cook over medium heat until it’s dark blonde in color. This will take the raw taste out of the flour. Slowly add the milk while stirring like crazy. If you don’t stir well your gravy will get really lumpy and almost impossible to salvage. Cook until the mixture comes to a boil, at which point it will surprise you and suddenly thicken to a gravy-like consistency. Add salt and fresh ground pepper to taste.

This is also a good base for such things as S.O.S. (Shit On a Shingle – dice chipped beef, add to gravy, and serve over toast), breakfast (crumble pan sausage into the gravy and serve over biscuits), and scalloped potatoes (layer potato slices, sauteed onions, cream sauce, and sharp cheddar cheese in a pan, cook until potatoes are does).

The recipe is very easy to scale. Just keep X constant and use:
X tablespoons fat
X tablespoons flour
X cups milk

Tonight’s meal:

Pan fried chicken
Mashed skin-on potatoes
Cream gravy
Buttermilk biscuits
Strawberry shortcake

all homemade. Scuse me, gotta pop now.

You know you’ve been reading too much Sue Grafton when you actually start craving peanut butter and pickle sandwiches. Honestly, they’re pretty good. Get whole-grain wheat bread, and use crunchy peanut butter and bread and butter pickles. They even make the pickles in the sandwich stackers.

We dropped the kids in Houston so we can clean out the garage at the old house. We’re supposed to close a week from today. I’m still sick. Not as bad as I was, but I still manage to sound like death eating a cookie.

We’re still up in the air about flying or driving to Las Vegas next month. Flying scares the crap out of us, but driving will get us into town exhausted (not to mention add 3 or so days onto our trip). Flying will cost us a total of about 10 hours total, and driving will be about 40. Flying will cost more, but driving puts stress on the car. Since we’re closing on the house, we can splurge on first class tickets.

Reading back what I wrote, it seems like I want to fly, doesn’t it?

Tonight we went to eat at Taqueria Arandas. I had the carne asada plate, which is a thin slice of marinated skirt steak, grilled and served over avocados and tomatoes, with fried cactus (nopalitos) and sauteed green onion on top, all with a liberal side helping of Spanish rice and refried beans. I drank a huge glass of horchata, rice milk that’s been sweetened and flavored with vanilla. For dessert I had a Pulparindo, which is dried tamarind pulp (like fruit leather), that’s been flavored with sugar, salt, and peppers, so it’s like a sour, salty, sweet, spicy fruit rollup.

Then on the way home we almost ran over an armadillo that was trying to get across the street.

Why do I even bother to shop anywhere else but Steinmart? I placed a huge order with an online store and got it in the other day; all but three items were grossly undersized. Like the bust was 8 inches smaller than it should have been. Steinmart always has really nice clothes for really low prices. I’m stocking up for my April and May trips.

I’m thinking about smuggling booze onboard the cruise ship. In a mouthwash bottle. Heh. I’m so 16 years old.

I ordered a TiVo today. If overnight shipping weren’t $50, I would have gotten it. As it was, ground shipping was free, even though I have to deal with UPS (which, by the way, sucks, as we all know).

I can’t wait!

Ok look, here’s the deal. Store-bought beef jerky costs around U.S. $25 per pound. Home-made is ridiculously simple and cheap. A dehydrator from Walmart is a one time cost of $40, or you can just use your oven. Three pounds of top round will yield about one pound of jerky, and will cost around $12 at the grocery store (and if you know a hunter or are one, just pop a cap in a deer for around $1 per bullet). The price for spices is negligible, and you probably have them in the house already. And store-bought jerky usually has nitrates or other preservatives in it. It’s insane to buy some when you can make it for half the price.

Mix all this stuff together to taste:

Worcestershire sauce (~2/3 c.)
soy sauce (~2/3 c.)
teriyaki sauce (~2/3 c.)
Liquid Smoke (~ 1 T.)
garlic powder (~ 1 T.)
kosher salt (~ 1 T.)
fresh ground black pepper (~ 1 T.)
onion powder (~ 1 T.)
red pepper flakes (~ 1 t.)

Slice thin top round beef, or bison, or venison, or emu, or turkey, or any other non-fatty meat. Keep thickness less than 1/4″.

Marinate the meat in the mixture overnight.

Put it in the dehydrator.

Check it after 3 hours or so. When it’s ready, it will crack instead of bend, and it will not appear at all moist. It probably won’t all cook at the same rate, so just take out pieces as they’re ready. Don’t immediately put them in a sealed bag, since the heat will cause condensation which will ruin the jerky.

Measurements are approximate – it’s your jerky; make it how you like it. If you want it sweeter, increase the proportion of Worcestershire. If you want it saltier, add more salt and soy sauce.

This has been Auntie Addlepated’s cooking lesson for the day. Perhaps later if you’re lucky I will give you the deep fried Twinkie recipe.

It’s a Southern thing.

Go turn on FoodTV. Now now now. Iron Chef is on with Sakai vs. Chen, and they’re cooking turtles. Do it!

Well. We had an interesting dinner tonight. At around 8:30 we realized that 1) the two year old was still napping and 2) we had dinner to cook. I ran up to get the kid while hub got dinner preparations together. The menu was grilled marinated cornish game hens, garlic mashed potatoes, and wilted spinach salad. He had to go get the fire going, which normally takes a little while. He kept squirting lighter fluid and the fire kept *whoomf*ing up into the trees (our lot has no place that’s not completely canopied by trees, which is ok because we’re vampires as you can tell by the time of most of my posts).

Anyway, he tossed the birds on the grill and ran inside to wash out the pan. When he came out they were on Fire, with a capital F. Somehow he managed to get the fire out but now we had blackened grilled marinated cornish game hen.

By the time the birds were done, it was nigh unto 10:00 and the two year old was desperate for food, so much so that she kept stealing cheese and ham from the 10 month old and claiming she was “sharing”. Hub ran out to get the birds. He put them all into the pan, started to pick up the pan, and emitted a scream of pain. He thought he burned himself on one of the chickens. He hollered for a pot holder but I wasn’t fast enough or something and he ran inside to run his hand under cold water. At which point I look up and see that he’s brought a hitchhiker with him. A big huge gigantic angry red wasp, perched on the kitchen cabinets and looking big and huge and angry. I whip the baby out of the high chair and hold out my hand for the two year old saying “come here come here come here now now now it’s really important, baby” and she says…

come on… all together now…

“NO!”

So I grab her by the hand and hustle her into the other room and slam the door between us and the angry huge red wasp and paddle her, then worry because there are no curtains on the windows in that room and I wonder if the neighbors think I’m a child beater now.

In the meantime, hub dissects (well, more like cleaves in two) the big angry red wasp with our best most expensive butcher knife.

As we sat down to dinner (after putting the meat tenderizer and baking soda on hub’s hand; you’d think we were having it for dinner) I idly mentioned that maybe the wasp stung the chicken also, and one of us would take a bite and get a mouthful of venom.

I was joking of course, but hub didn’t think it was funny. He has no sense of humor sometimes.

Hub went upstairs to make us all sandwiches. He got his chicken salad made just the way he liked it. At this point the 2 year old decided it was naptime, so hub took her upstairs to put her to bed. He came back to the kitchen to find the cat eating his chicken salad. Hub then threw away said chicken salad in a fit of pique. And he’s threatening to pull off the cats’ legs.

About the cat. He’s 12 years old, anemic, hyperthyroid, and has kidney failure. I have to give him subcutaneous fluids nightly, plus 3 pills and a vitamin syrup. The poor guy has been on this nasty low protein special catfood for the past couple of years to control his renal failure. Can you blame the poor guy for trying to score some chicken salad?