I went to La Salita on Eubank for lunch for the first time
in several months and got my favorite, Chile Relleno stuffed with Swiss cheese
on a bed of turkey with double pinto beans and extra garnish and onions with
green chili (the lite bite version has only one chile Relleno and is $7.10 plus
$.54 for the extra turkey) and is more than enough to eat, especially since you
must leave room for one of the best sopapillas in town.
I rode to Rio Bravo and got back and took a shower and met
with a client until 6:15. When I returned
to the kitchen I suggested that we fricassee the thawed out chicken thighs. Suzette agreed and suggested mashed potatoes. When we went to the fridge to get the chicken
we noticed a bag of broccoli, so we had our dinner menu.
Suzette put flour and salt and pepper in a gallon freezer
bag and dusted the chicken and then fried the four thawed chicken thighs
(Costco) in about 1/3 inch of very hot canola oil to crisp the skin for about
twenty minutes and then laid them on a cookie sheet and baked them in the oven for
thirty minutes, while I peeled and rough diced four Russet potatoes and boiled
them until soft.
I also de-stemmed the broccoli flowerets from a stalk of
broccoli and put them in the steamer with enough water to steam them.
Then Suzette put the potatoes into the Kitchenaid bowl and
mixed them with milk and butter to cream them to slightly lumpy, but creamy (I
hate flaccid creamed potatoes that have the consistency of thin cream of wheat or taste like they came out of box).
When the chicken was done she added the flour mixture to the
hot canola oil and cooked the flour to a golden brown roux. Then she poured off the canola oil until only
the darkened flour and a bit of oil was left.
She then made 2 cups of chicken stock by dissolving Knorr dehydrated
chicken stock in hot water and I poured that slowly into the hot flour and grease
until it mixed in. There was too much
flour to absorb the chicken stock so we added about 1 cup of milk and then we
had to make another cup of chicken stock before the gravy had absorbed enough liquid
to turn into a thick, smooth (not lumpy) gravy. We removed 2/3 of the gravy to a plastic storage container and added more milk to the remaining gravy to thin it out further, because as it cooks gravy will thicken. Finally, we agreed that the gravy was right (thick enough to sit on the potatoes and chicken without running, but not so thick as to taste doughy).
Then we started the broccoli steaming and in ten minutes
dinner was ready. To finish the dish with a little flair, Suzette plucked and snipped five or six sprigs of chives with a scissors and garnished the potatoes with bits of cut chive.
I poured glasses of the PPI 2008 Marques de Riscal Rueda, because
its huge flavor would cut through the grease of the chicken and gravy. It tasted much better tonight with the fried
chicken and heavy gravy than last night, perhaps because it had oxidized slightly,
which gave it a lighter, less closed character.
This all reminds me of when I was young, around 6 years old.
On holidays, such as Christmas and Easter, when my parents entertained for a
large group of people, I would spend the night with my favorite babysitter,
Granny Simpson. She was from Texas
pioneer stock and lived in an old wooden double shot gun house with three
connected bedrooms on one side and a small parlor, a dining room, bathroom and
kitchen on the other side, with doors connecting all the rooms, on an acre or
two of land. The bathroom was off the
dining room as I recall. She had a chicken
coup and a bunch of chickens in the back yard and a large garden. Most of the parties were on a Saturday night
and I suspect rather wild with lots of drinking because that was what folks in
Texas did in the early 50’s.
Granny
Simpson was a very religious Baptist, the kind who go to prayer meeting on
Wednesdays and church on Sunday. She
lived on McCart Street, five or six blocks from the Southwestern Baptist Theological
Seminary and attended the Gambrell Street Baptist Church located across the
street from the Seminary (sort of like living six blocks from the Vatican, if
you are a Catholic).
Sundays were very predictable. We got dressed up and went to Sunday school at
9:00 and then at 10:30 or 11:00 the church service and then we (my brother
Billy and I) and Granny’s son, George and his wife and their kids, George, Jr.,
Rena and Carol Sue (who was my age) would go to Granny’s house for Sunday
dinner. As I recall Sunday dinner was
the same as what we made tonight with the addition of Granny Simpson having to
go out to the back yard to catch, wring the necks and pluck the feathers from
two chickens and then cutting them into pieces.
Everyone had a task and in about an hour we were sitting at Granny’s
Simpson’s table eating our Sunday dinner of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, cream
gravy and a vegetable, just like tonight, except peach cobbler was the usual
dessert and we also usually had some creamed corn made at Granny Simpson’s for
Sunday . These memories are very vivid. I particularly recall attending Sunday School at Gambrell Street Baptist Church, where I was a curiosity as the only Jew most of the kids attending had ever met. Perhaps my memories are vivid because I remember the kids saying to me, “You know you are going to go to Hell because you are not baptized.” I wasn’t quite sure what Hell was at 6 or 8 years old, but my parents had warned me not to get baptized if I was offered the opportunity.
I loved Granny Simpson very much. She was a fixture in our family and even went to Ruidoso with our family to take care of us one summer. I also remember being driven to a hospital and visiting with her because she was sick in a bed and dying of cancer, even though I did not know much about hospitals or cancer or dying at the time.
I guess the moral to this story is that food, religion and
love can impress strong lasting memories on one’s mind. Of the three, food seems to be the strongest
for me.
As Ed Louden, who started Bacchus Wines and Spirits, often said
as we sat across the table at lunch at one of his new favorite restaurants, “Life
is too short to eat bad food or drink bad wine”. That seems to me to be a good axiom for living
a happy life, no matter what religion you are.
Bon Appétit
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