A Gravy Recipe and Zen and the Art of Vintage Stove Maintenance
Cooking season is around the corner!
Our beautiful 1958 O’Keefe & Merritt gas range is the warm, hard-working heart of our kitchen. She is very zen! People first!Everyone and even our animals gravitate to her coziness. Here we are making fried pork chops and milk gravy. Making milk gravy! The roux (butter and flour cooked together) is the most important part!
White Gravy (Milk Gravy)
3 Tablespoons real butter
3 Tablespoons all-purpose flour
Salt & pepper to taste
Milk standing by!
To make delicious gravy you need a big skillet or pan, wide and flat on the bottom, along with a whisk that won’t hurt your pan. Turn the heat to medium and put the butter in the skillet. Melt the butter completely and then stir in the flour. Let this cook and brown while stirring constantly. (The longer it cooks the darker it gets the more flavor it will have!) This part is called the roux. With your milk kept close get your whisk ready and pour a little milk into the pan while whisking- let it loosen up your roux a bit, then pour in a little more and a little more while constantly whisking (to keep from getting lumps!). Keep going until it’s a nice thick, creamy consistency. Turn off the heat, salt and pepper it to taste and you are ready to go!
Want mashed potatoes with your gravy? Rolls with butter? How about pie for dessert?
Thanksgiving is next week and with that I am very thankful to have a week off from teaching school. Thanksgiving week is a great time to change everything over for the coming seasons of joy. It’s also our yearly deep-clean and maintenance on our sweet stove!
The best cooking season is here! Let’s wash all the pans! (We are blessed to have a Le Creuset outlet close to us!)Upper badge with reflection of a slot for an electrical outlet and the knob to turn on the lights. Ready for a clean!Before removing the chrome tops. First, we clean and remove the entire top. The chromed side pieces and the solid aluminum griddle plate (it weighs 30 lbs!). Underneath are the “gasworks.” At first they look complicated, but they are very simple and easy to repair. Here it is with the cast iron burner rings and metal gas tubes removed. (The griddle burner is still in.) A lot of little food particles get down here and need to be cleaned out.After cleaning and blowing everything out of the burners with canned air we put everything back together and light it so we can adjust the flames and pilots. The back burners don’t burn as hot- they are simmer burners. They will still boil water though! Robertshaw made the oven thermostat systems for O’Keefe & MerrittUnderneath gets vacuumed out- especially important if we have been doing any plaster work as the dust has caused our pilot lights trouble before. These two “pickle” valves are the safeties to the oven pilots. If the pilots go out they turn off the gas!Mrs. O’Keefe’s “face” -I think she looks happy!A little Holly Hobbie electric easy-bake oven. I just love old stoves-even toy ones! We still cook in this sometimes- its fun!Mood board for summer- loving that mint green Chambers range. It’s the only other stove I would have after our OK&M.
Happy Thanksgiving and happy stoves to you from Kansas Street,
Life on Kansas Street 