Theresa And The Story Of The Most Convoluted Dinner I've Ever Made..

Often times, when I ask what's for dinner, my fiancee will challenge me to make Chicken Fricassee.

Today, I went "I see you your Chicken Fricassee, sir!", and googled that stuff right up.

Let me say, the finished product was so good. Soul food in the finest sense of the word - hearty, creamy, and with enough substance that it really settles into your ribs. It does, however, have a great ability to grow, so when your plating it, plate about half of what you think your going to want! We both learned that the hard way!

Thomas Jefferson's Chicken Fricassee.

That is the link to the recipe I made. Why it's cited as being Thomas Jefferson's, I don't know, but there you go.

The recipe could not have been simpler, both in terms of ingredients and in terms of the actual process. The only thing that made it so convoluted was that it took so bloody many steps!

Brown the chicken. Take the chicken out, make the gravy. Put the chicken back, let it simmer. Take the chicken AND the gravy back out (but store them seperatly, naturally), and saute the onions and mushrooms. Then put the gravy back in, then put the chicken back.

Doesn't it seem like that could have been streamlined at least a little? It wasn't at all hard, and the ingredient list is fairly short, there was just so many steps to it. Although oddly, I looked in another cookbook that had a chicken fricassee recipe, and it had a shorter list of steps, but a longer list of ingredients. So evidentally, it's an either or type of situation.

My next step was a pumpkin cake. Came from my Bisquick cookbook. Basically, it was bisquick, pumpkin pie pumpkin (which either my Kroger doesn't have pumpkin pie pumpkin yet, or alot of people were baking pie today, because I had to go with canned pumpkin, rather then pumpkin pie pumpkin), egg and sugar. Bake. If I'd gotten the pumpkin pie pumkin, I can imagine that it would have tasted like a really great piece of pumpkin pie. Don't get me wrong, it was still delicious, it just wasn't what I imagine the good people that wrote that book in the 1970's were really going for.

But I bought the big can of pumpkin, so I get to try pumpkin pancakes too!

And thus, we bring to a close an entry that included more mention of pumkin then I'd ever thought possible. Good night and good eats!