Potato, broccoli, chicken gravy

The sauce originated as cooking liquid for a single chicken breast. Not much flavor there, but none of the flavor available in the chicken breast is lost. The buttermilk is flavored mildly with a variety of my favorite spices, all in moderation, coriander, cumin, even less fennel, and chipotle for smoky heat, and butter and tablespoons of Marsala. It is very good but a bit weak and a bit too much at 2 cups total. The remainder is reheated today with water to loosen and, this is cheating a bit, scrapings from a Mexican chicken bullion cube, about 1/4 a cube to pump up the chicken flavor a bit. I have no idea what that cube is, mostly chemicals or salts, I suppose, and very little actual chicken.

Photography I've got my sunset act down, now all I have to do is wait for the earth to swing around the far long fat side of its elliptical orbit and get back to summer for spectacular Colorado sunsets, meanwhile I'm still learning things in Photoshop and Adobe Bridge and also Automator in Mac all for handling massive amounts of data as raw photo files. They must be raw so that their midtone can be adjusted all at once to bring out detail in shadows of buildings, raw files can adjust the whole stack at once. Well over a hundred photos at 4288 pixels wide and 10.2MB each, hardly enough space on my little laptop that struggled to rearrange space for them, are reduced to 400 pixels wide and their brilliant detail reduced to glaucoma-level and only 4MB total, less than half the data for a single photo for the whole stack of 124 photos. Pretty good optimization, eh? It can go even lower, to 2MB or even lower to below 1MB. I hate shrinking photos, it's such an injustice. This is animated GIF, video form is better quality but much more megabytes.

Mashed potato, chicken gravy

Maybe it's turkey gravy. I'm terrible for not marking frozen packages. Doesn't matter, it sure is good. Two of these and a peach is all that I had all day and it is so amazing, so satisfying that I could do the exact same thing again today. It doesn't look like much, no color, but it has two tablespoons butter in it and the same amount of fortified wine and those two things with all that starch and poultry flavor with a bit of herbs go a very long way for slathering on by forkful an engaging and satisfying landscape of flavor and fat-satisfaction all across the inside of your mouth down your throat and filling your stomach to red mark full.

When one encounters this combination as one of three or four things on a plate the abundance taken for granted and handled so casually really is astonishing. 

The ricer is brilliantly automatic while still being manual and so fast and easy and perfect it feels like cheating. 

Before I dropped Facebook somebody wrote, "How do you make gravy?" Seemed an odd question asked on the internet when one can inquire [gravy] and have it answered  and with pictures a hundred times on places like this right here.

Gravy is a sauce started with equal parts fat and flour until cooked, about one minute. With additional spices or herbs, the ones that you like in the amount that suits you. A liquid is added while stirring forming an emulsion of fat and greater amount of combined liquids, stock, broth, milk, wine, water, when whisked the liquids are held together mostly by the starch but also emulsifying ingredients as mustard and sometimes even egg. The following ratios are foolproof.

1 Tablespoon butter

1 Tablespoon flour (level measured tablespoon).

1 Cup chicken or turkey broth or stock

[salt, pepper, chile flakes or powder, garlic powder, nutmeg, oregano, cumin, ground coriander seed, ground mustard seed, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, wine any type, Sriracha sauce, any dry herb, what have you, whatever flavor addition you like but in moderation]

This forms a bubbling sludge. Remove from heat. Whisk or rapidly stir in liquid in 1-2-3 stages, return to heat. Another minute. 

Boil. Done. Gravy is fast.

The sauce thickens to boiling and thickens slightly more as it cools.  

Roasted chicken open face sandwich

Ordinary whole chicken soaked in buttermilk, fennel, garlic, salt, pepper from early morning to afternoon.

Beer can up the cavity technique, a method I've avoided due to its obscenity to nature, and with a Pepsi can with some still in it because all the beer around here is in bottles.

Baked to 10 degrees beyond done the way I like it, so surprised to see the red bone. The temperature at the thigh was way too high for that yet there it is. The bird did not release any liquid although it did drip some fat. It browned unevenly. The white meat is tender and moist. 

Simple velouté sauce

1.5 tablespoon butter

1.5 tablespoon flour

1.5 cups chicken broth

1 tablespoon sour cream

salt/pepper/chicken spices/nutmeg

Southern buttermilk biscuits, chicken gravy

1 Cup flour

1/8 tsp baking soda (to compensate and react with acid in buttermilk)

1 + 1/2 teaspoons baking powder (to pick up where baking soda and buttermilk leave off)

1/8 teaspoon salt.

2 Tablespoons buttermilk powder (I just discovered this stuff. Love it.) 

3 Tablespoons cold butter cut thinly off the stick then rapidly rubbed in never allowing the heat of your hands touch butter for more than a second.

1/2 Cup ice cold water stirred in with a fork or a knife. 

The cold dough dumped onto a piece of plastic wrap stretched out flatly and pressed. The plastic wrap used to fold the flattened dough in half then flattened again. Repeated for as many times as layers you want to build in without overworking the dough. The more the gluten develops by flattening then the tougher the biscuits will be. 

Riced potato, chicken gravy

Riced means mashed using a ricer, a squishing device resembling a large garlic press. It's the way to go. It comes with three discs, this is the middle size so minor lumpage on purpose, it smashes through potato worms with coarse furry starch surface that absorbs preheated milk and butter like a mop. Presto. Mashed potatoes just like that. Doubly absorbent if the potato is stabbed all the way through several times to help dry it out. 

Emergency mashed potato and chicken gravy kit.

Man, this gravy is good.

There is a word for this sort of thing that starts with a roux and uses stock for liquid, velouté sauce, flavored however one likes, significantly, this has vermouth, and that makes it very different, it gives it that wine/butter thing that works so well and uses its spirit-ability to pervade every molecule individually, it seems so, and contributes sweetness besides. This has cumin, coriander seed powder, garlic, turmeric, pepper and salt, but no chile this time, and these splashes of alcohol have an impressive ability to blend all that into something new and spectacular. I put off tasting it, what if it's gross? I'm hesitant for some reason, the color looks a bit off, but I do taste, must check for corrections, and wow, its odd color gives no clue to the pleasure that explodes in my mouth, covers everything in there and lingers momentarily after swallowing and the brain fires off an imperative, "More of that right now." 

The stock is from Tony's down the street, frozen. What a convenience that is, homemade right there. 

Biscuit and gravy

However much fat your flour can hold, however much you want it to have, whatever type of fat you want, mixed in cold and smashed individually and rapidly with cold fingertips. Farm wives would hold their fingertips under cold water first then dry them so their body heat wouldn't melt the butter or lard. 

The flour also contains baking powder.

As you know, baking powder is baking soda with two types of acids that activate at different temperatures. This dough has buttermilk, an acid, so additional baking soda is included to balance. This double whammy of soda increases the salt-like elements that have a distinct salt-like taste so regular salt is greatly reduced to compensate. 

The buttermilk is drizzled in while mixing with a dinner knife while in the bowl until the lumpy mixture pulls together in one single lump. The mixture is not kneaded at all. It's smashed and that's about it. This was smashed and folded twice to pick up more flour so it has four layers, but that's not necessary and actually never really done. 

I should mention the oven is frightfully hot. But only at the start, then turned down to something reasonable. That's to shock the little dough piles in extreme heat to activate their chemical reactions, and to compensate for heat lost from opening the oven door, but if kept at that high temperature the biscuits would certainly burn. 

This is one of the things you can get with a whole roasted chicken. 

Leftover bits were shredded incompletely and broth from the chicken thickened with flavored roux.  All natural ingredients. Seriously. No artificial anything to extend its shelf life, its transportability, or its marketability, just plain butter, flour, and chicken and stuff. Oh, baking powder, that a chemical, but that could be omitted. 

What goes into my sauce?

The same old usual suspects

Along with the flour and butter in a small sauce pan for a roux

* mustard powder

* coriander seed ground to powder

* cumin seeds ground to powder

* black pepper

* sea salt

* hot red chile flakes

* sage

That forms a thick sludge like material that darkens to brown. 

When that lump of butter/flour/spices browns in a minute then all at once about 1 ounce of sake or white wine or beer or something with alcohol is dumped into the pot chased with cup of chicken broth and whisked vigorously to a thick sauce. It is a marvel to behold it come together in seconds like that, and it's done. 

Mashed potato, chicken gravy

The thing is I did not care to eat anything much less cook anything far less clean anything afterwards therefore I must transform something magically.

It's the only way when you're this lazy. 

These potatoes come from the magical land of Idaho so that really helps. 

They are small, but no less magic. 

Wand.

So there's that. 

Oh, almost forgot.

Oh. 

Magics!