Comfort Food

There were no cookbooks or recipe cards in Grandma Mayse’s pantry. Grandma never measured anything. When she got up in the morning, she put her cobbler’s apron over her housedress and went to the kitchen. Most of her day was spent there, preparing one meal or another.

I remember her chicken and dumplings as my favorite. She started with a five or six pound chicken, plump and round, with a rich, deep yellow skin, not some pale-skinned, hormone-infused, bony runt of a bird. When she cut it in pieces, big globs of yellow fat clung to the insides. It all went into the big pot of salted, boiling water on the stove.

When the chicken was done, she took it out of the pot and set it aside. Then she would take the ceramic bowl that was big enough to work in without making a mess. She tossed in several handfuls of flour, a few pinches of salt, and a heaping spoon from the can of baking powder. This was sifted and then she scooped out a handful of Crisco, blended it quickly with her fingertips, and the mixture was pushed to the sides of the bowl to make a well.

She poured cold milk in the well, and more fingertip blending followed. This was dropped onto a floured, wooden board and rolled into an oval. She cut it into strips and dropped them into the boiling pot of broth. They sank for a second or two and then popped to the top of the broth where they battled for space around ten minutes.

The result was light-as-air dumplings, fluffy and cooked dry inside, not doughy. We gathered around the table and waited impatiently while grace was said. Finally, the generic cialis online donssite.com pills are prepared for online shop and presented in front of the global patrons. Today’s era is known as the biggest gadget world because every person across the globe uses electronic gadgets to perform generic viagra online Continue Shopping their daily tasks. This is thought to be actually one cialis generic pharmacy of the leading causes of the infertility in women. Therefore start your journey with the help of this drug and its frequent use can provide a hassles free society that has levitra on line been constantly degrading in quality measure after getting infected by impotency.

Dinner might be followed by a peach cobbler, the crust made in the same manner as the dumplings, with peaches Grandma canned last fall, a fistful of sugar, or maybe two, a pinch of nutmeg, and a sprinkle of cinnamon made it a scrumptious treat.

No one had to urge us to clean our plates. When the meal was over, the leftover broth went in the icebox. When the fat on top had congealed, it was added to the can of chicken fat Grandma always had on hand. It had multiple uses. Fried potatoes had a golden sheen when a scoop of fat was added to the pan. If one of us came down with a cold or any other illness, the fat was quickly converted into chicken soup. It was her version of Liquid Wrench for a congested chest.

I have tried many times to duplicate her dumplings without success. None of the recipes I used came out the same, but then, Grandma never measured anything.

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