Memories of Chicken & Gravy
Tonight I used some leftover chicken and chicken stock to create one of our favorite cold weather meals, chicken and gravy over mashed potatoes. It’s a dish I remember from my childhood in more ways than one.
The best memory is of course the joy of eat that hot gravy and chicken after it had been ladled over a pile of steaming, freshly mashed potatoes. YUM! We were almost guaranteed to have this lovely concoction shortly after we’d had roast chicken, what better way to use the leftover chicken. The chicken and gravy of my childhood always had a veggie on the side, but more about that later.
The other memory of chicken and gravy is of the first time I made it with my Grandmother. I was probably ten or eleven at the time and was used to helping prepare meals at home, heck I cooked meals at home. So while my Grandmother picked the chicken I made the gravy. When the gravy was ready she turned off the heat and carefully placed the chicken in the pan. When she finished I picked up the spoon and started to stir. Poor Grammie, she just about lost it, I stopped and apologized, for what I wasn’t sure and waited for her to calm. Turns out she had kept the white meat and the dark meat separate as she picked, and placed them carefully into the pan so they would stay that way; further she told me if you stirred the mix after you put the chicken in, the chicken would start to shred. Wow, who knew, not me that’s for sure, but you can believe that I never made that mistake again.
Back to tonight, you can trust that the chicken was picked off the carcass and dumped straight into the gravy, no one cares if the white and dark get mixed, not in my house anyway. And veggies on the side, no way, here we just dump something frozen, like a peas and carrots mix, in with the gravy and chicken and let it all warm together. The funny thing is no matter how different the chicken and gravy of my adulthood is from the chicken and gravy of my childhood it still has the same affect, warm happy taste buds and tummies.
Yum! I like to fry my chicken and eat it with cream gravy. Fried chicken is one of the things I cook really well, but my gravy needs some work! What a lovely story.
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You’re making my mouth water.
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Good story. I never realized that Grammie didn’t mix the dark and white chicken. Probably because she never let me cook meals when I was young. She must have known that a rebel like me would ruthlessly mix them. LOL
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