Creamed anything

My mother was the master of feeding six people with enough meat for three. Yes, we were meat eaters, sort of. And every meal was served with a garden salad. It's an Italian tradition, I suppose.

To go along with our love for meat, my father liked just about anything "creamed." Creamed chicken. Cha-ching. Creamed dried beef. Cha-ching. Creamed sausage. Cha-ching. Creamed peas with pearl onions. Cha-ching. Creamed spinach. Cha-ching

My mother's basic "cream" recipe was so easy to make. And when I was first married, we had very little money, but I had my mother's "cream" recipe. Back then a gallon of milk was 99 cents, a loaf of bread was a quarter, and chicken was 39 cents a pound.

Alan and I thrived on pancakes and spaghetti, and "creamed anything."

So, I'm putting my mom's "cream" recipe on this BLOG and you can add to it what you want.

4 tblspns butter (or margarine)
1/4 cup white flour
2 cups whole milk

Melt the butter, whisk the flour into the melted butter. Turn back the heat as you're doing this. When the heat is on low to low-med, slowly add the milk, whisking the entire time. This should give you a not-too-thick/not-too-thin cream sauce.

You can add whatever you want: left over chicken (or as my mother did, boil a small chicken in water and then pick the bones, store half the chicken meat in the freezer and add the rest of the chicken meat to the cream sauce). Or, you can add chipped dried beef (it comes in jars now days). When I was a child, mom would send me down to the grocer at the corner of Clements Bridge and the Pike because they had the best fresh dried beef. I'd get 1/4 pound for 25 cents and mom would make the cream sauce. Dinner that night would be cream dried beef over RICE -- yes rice. My dad liked it that way.

In the mid-50s Pepperidge Farms came out with a frozen puff pastry and mom would bake six of those pastry cups and fill them with creamed whatever-was-handy. Yummy. Dad loved it that way. If there was any left over creamed whatever-was-handy, mom would toast a few slices of Italian bread and dad would slurp up the remainder of the creamed stuff.

Cheap, easy, and very comforting.

ttfn