Gravy Recipe

I was going to post this on FB, but I realized I would have trouble finding it later and this is definitely a keeper...

My wife has gone off with some of her girlfriends for the weekend leaving me and the boys to fend for ourselves. Fortunately this is the week after Thanksgiving. Unfortunately Melodye decided to put the leftover turkey in the freezer for soup and I didn't know about it until it was frozen hard-hard-hard.

But we do have lots of mashed potatoes. (Thanks, Lori!) And carrots and carrot casserole (tastes like sweet potato casserole - if you've never had Melodye's carrot casserole then you are missing out on a thing of beauty and wonder!) and all those other good things.

But to properly enjoy mashed potatoes you need gravy.

"No problem," I thought, "Jen told me how to make gravy a while back." [Madly searches through viber, whatsapp, email, etc. and comes up with squat.] "No problem," I thought, "if Jen can make gravy certainly someone else in the known universe knows how and I can find it on Google."

Have you searched the internet for recipes recently?

Recipe for chicken soup: start with a can of chicken soup and add water

Recipe for turtle cheese cake: start with the turtle cheese cake from Sam's Club and place it on a tray

Recipe for chicken cordon bleu: get a package of prepared cordon bleu chicken from the frozen section and heat it up

WHERE'S A REAL RECIPE?! I DON'T LIVE NEXT TO WAL-MART OR SAM'S CLUB!!!

After several deep breaths I start over. I'm not a total dunce in the kitchen - I can do this!

(1) Tell your sons to stop contradicting you over the last sentence about being a dunce in the kitchen
(2) Get a medium saucepan and put it on the big gas burner
(3) Go get milk from the frig and come back to find the pan already sizzling. Move to medium burner.
(4) Pour in some milk. (How much? I don't know - what do they say in those fancy cooking shows "season to taste"? - add milk to taste)
(5) Go look for chicken boullon cubes. Don't get distracted trying to figure out how to spell boullion/bouillon/bullion - it just doesn't matter.
(6) Since you don't know where your wife keeps things like buollioun cubes just start in the seasoning, avoid spending too much delicious distracting time in the chocolate chips, and ... come up blank.
(7) Search in the other drawers that you've never had to open before. Finally find an old, old box of bullouion cubes (beef) that your wife would have thrown away if she knew they existed. That works.
(8) Throw 2 in the milk.
(9) Stir with a chopping motion to break up the bollon cubes (use the dirty pancake flipper from yesterday morning - it's good for chopping the bullun cubes into bits.)
(10) Periodically panic as the milk starts to boil over - quickly remove from heat.
(11) After several occurrences of (10) realize that you could, you know, turn the heat down. (Step aside, cooking-show-fanatics - I'm on the way to becoming an amazing chef!)
(12) Eventually the fun slows down as you can't find any more bits to chop or squish against the side so go looking for more ingredients.
(13) Find something vaguely reminiscent of the stuff you poured out of the turkey a few days ago. It looks awfully gross, but pour some in anyway. Gravy isn't supposed to look good - it's supposed to taste good!
(14) Stir some more. Get bored and go looking for more ingredients.
(15) All kinds of inspiration in the spice drawer, but the garlic is empty (She has a bag of the good stuff but who knows where that's kept?!). But next to garlic (alphabetically) is "Greek Seasoning!" Hurray! [Greek seasoning has a long and glorious history in my cooking] Dump a generous quantity in and then add half again as much just for fun.
(16) Stir until bored again.
(17) Get the flour and sprinkle it in while constantly mixing. Give up on the pancake turner and go ahead and get the whisk dirty. Keep doing this until it thickens up a bit.

It may have taken 17 steps, but that gravy was AMAZING!  My 13-year-old had this to say:

"99 out of 100 of 'Daddy's Creations' are horrible and should be thrown away. But this one recipe is amazing - the best gravy I've ever tasted. I hope you remember what you did because you've got to write down the recipe!"

Ignore the first sentence - he was obviously hit on the head during basketball today or something - but you are now the proud recipient of my first published recipe (well, web-published anyway).

Comments

  1. Were you able to slice the gravy when it was done?
    I would have been rolling on the floor laughing if I wasn't wearing my seat belt as I read this .

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  3. Slice it?! Since time began there have been 10 great bowls of gravy and this one topped them all! (Did you see what I did there? "Topped"? Isn't that cute?)

    No, actually the consistency was just what I was hoping for. I guess that's the advantage of sprinkling the flour little by little - you can see exactly how much thickening you get. It was perfect as we ate it.

    Now as it cooled afterwards it got ... erm ... firmer ... but I'm pretty sure that's what all gravy does if it's got a nice consistency to it... When I reheated it for supper it was fine again...

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