I Made a Chicken

I channeled my mom tonight and put a perfect baked chicken on the table--complete with rice and gravy and peas--and the kids loved it. Baked chicken--always with rice and gravy and peas--was one of my favorite meals as a kid. Now, the one I made tonight was different than mom's by degrees--it was a "natural" chicken (as organic as I could find) and the rice was steamed in our rice cooker not boiled with butter and there were corn niblets in with the peas because DD is partial to corn. But the spirit of the meal was there. My gravy even thickened appropriately! It was so deeply satisfying to serve that chicken, which I managed to make easily and relatively quickly. And watching them gobble it down, well, just made me happy.

I think baked chicken might be my favorite meal again.

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Mom’s Baked Chicken

3-4 lb. fryer chicken
salt and pepper
1 cup water

Preheat oven to 500°F. Salt and pepper chicken. Sear uncovered in oven for 10-15 minutes. Add 1 cup water, cover, and reduce heat to 350°F. Bake for 1 ½ hours.
Make gravy and serve with rice and peas.

Mom

Gravy
I must be patient, I must be patient, I must be patient to let the gravy turn the right copper color—it always takes longer and it will thicken.

Heat 4 tablespoons grease. Add 4 tablespoons of flour. Brown til copper-colored. DO NOT BURN. Stir in 4 cups drippings (or a combo of water and broth to make 4 cups liquid). Add chicken bouillon and salt and pepper to taste.

Mom

Rice

¾ cups rice (like Texmati)
1 ½ cup water
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon butter

Put all ingredients in the pot. Boil and reduce heat. Cover. Simmer 15 minutes with no stirring.
If gummy, take lid off and cook a minute or so more. If hard, add 2 tablespoons of water and cook longer.

Mom

DD Doesn't Have Two Mommies

It's happened several times recently: I mention to DD that she has two mommies and she says no. Hmmmm, odd, because, well, she does.

And then she clarifies: she has one "mommy" and one "mama."

I'll be back

After days of posting really regularly, I've been a little overwhelmed here. While the babes are sleeping at night in their big kid beds (well, they go down okay, but they've been waking up 5-10 times a night. Each. Separately.), they are not napping at all. Which makes for a really long day. On good days, after hysterical playing and then exhaustion during "rest time" which leads not to sleep but to injury, I put them into the car and they're asleep before I'm off the block--I've gotten a lot of crocheting and reading done that way. In fact, today, I finished Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Pulitzer Prize-winning history A Midwife's Tale, about 18th-century midwife (and ancestor of Clara Barton) Martha Ballard. It was a wonderful journey through one woman's remarkable life as well as a social history of New England, about which I know little (my Ph.D. is Victorian England not colonial US). But I'm too tired to try to encapsulate it cleverly here.

For the next few days my mom will be here. So there should be some great recipe posts. Or none at all. The twins do wear a person out, despite her best intentions to cook.