Comfort Food

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Note: The world is topsy-turvey right now, so please forgive me if I post off schedule, I’m doing the best I can under the circumstances.

Tonight, I decided we could all use some good old-fashioned comfort food and Hubby and Adult Son agreed. So, I got out all the things I would need to make Dried Beef Gravy. Hubby’s family called it chipped beef gravy and made it slightly different, but basically the same idea.

So this meal requires 2 small or 1 large jar of Armour Brand Dried Beef. First you need to put a full stick of butter with the wax paper wrapper removed (obviously), into a 4 quart saucepan on medium high heat to melt. Then you need to cut the beef into 1/2 inch squares like the pile on the right in the photo below. The second jar, on the left, has not been cut yet. I learned tonight that it is much faster to use a large knife to cut the meat and toast for this meal that the kitchen scissors I have been using for years. Not sure I will ever go back to cutting with shears unless I have young helpers or something.

Once all the meat is cut up, the butter should be melted, but not scorched, so dump in the beef and stir it to coat it with the butter. Next put in a couple of heaping tablespoons of flour to thicken the gravy. If you get enough flour in and stir it well it will have soaked up all the butter and look like the photo below.

Next you add the milk and stir constantly so the flour doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pot. If you feel anything sticking to the bottom, just gently scrap it up and stir better from now on. Try to stir so you are testing the bottom for any stuck bits and scraping them up as you stir.

I don’t add all the milk at the beginning because I want to get it to thicken up then slowly add more and let it get thick again so you don’t add too much. I usually add some fresh ground pepper when about half the milk is in. Unfortunately, my Kuhn Rikon Ratchet Pepper Grinder failed me and the guts fell into the pot, so I fished them out and kept stirring. This is how we ended up with whole peppercorn medley in our meal, but it turned out fine, just wouldn’t recommend adding whole peppercorns and grinder parts if you can help it. See how pretty and thick it is in the photo above? In the photo below, you can see the peppercorns.

While all this stirring and thickening is going on pop some bread in the toaster. We usually allow 2 to 4 slices per person depending on how much comfort they need. When the toast is cool enough to touch, cut or tear it into bite-sized pieces, two pieces per bowl, as shown below.

Once you get the gravy thickened and just about to a full boil, still heating on medium-high heat the entire time, you c an turn the burner off and give it a few final stirs. Get a ladle out and spoon the gravy over the toast in each bowl and add more pepper to taste. We don’t usually salt this because the beef is usually plenty salty.

Serve warm and enjoy. This would work equally well over biscuits, but toast is our favorite.

It is nutritious? Well, it covers three of the four basic food groups and it would be a good way to get milk into your kids if they aren’t big milk drinkers, but if your kids are so picky that they don’t already love milk, they are likely too picky to try new foods anyway, so just enjoy this yourself, you deserve some comfort food. This is a relatively inexpensive meal to make and likely was the invention of some poor mom who didn’t have many choices to work with to fill her family’s bellies.

In case you are wondering, we found all the parts and Hubby is trying to put the little green pepper grinder that we absolutely LOVE back together.

So, what is your comfort food of choice? Care to share in the comments below? Feel free to leave a recipe, I have a feeling we are going to be doing a lot of home cooking the next few months.

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