Cherry Lane Cooks: The Purcells Eat Dessert First and Dine On Hamburger Gravy and Mashed Potatoes Second

Sunday, October 28, 2012

The Purcells Eat Dessert First and Dine On Hamburger Gravy and Mashed Potatoes Second

Fauneil, my wife, was raised on a farm in Montana. Many people compliment my cooking, but the truth is this: my best recipes are ones from my wife's childhood - the food she was raised on. Most of my recipes are not even mine. They come from a small dairy in quiet Fairfield, Montana.

A favorite, when she was growing up, was mashed potatoes and hamburger gravy. I am passing this recipe on to you.

1 teaspoon salt

4-5 large potatoes, cubed

1/2 cube of butter

1/2 cup sour cream

1 medium onion, chopped

1 pound hamburger

2 cups frozen peas

1/3 cup flour

2-3 cups milk

salt and pepper to taste (I use a 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper)

Fill a medium sized pot half full of water, add 1 teaspoon salt and bring to a boil.

While your water is boiling, pull out 4-5 large potatoes.

Peel them.

Now chop them into cubes. Here is how I do this. I first chop the potato in half.

I take each half and slice it into fourths.

Then I chop it it into cubes.

Once your water is boiling, add the potatoes and cook until tender. You should be able to pierce them easily with a fork.

Strain them.

When making mashed potatoes, I like to put my potatoes through a potatoes ricer. It makes them fluffier. You don't have to do that, though. You can just mash them if you want.

We got our potato ricer at Williams-Sonoma. Here's a link.

Click Here

You can also get them at Amazon.com. Here's a link for that.

Click Here

Okay, back to our potatoes. Add a 1/2 cube butter and a 1/2 cup sour cream.

Now mix it all together.

Now let's move on to the hamburger gravy - beginning with with onions. The recipe calls for one medium onion, but I only have this ginormous one. I'll only use 1/3 of it.

I dice up my onion (one medium) and cook it with one pound of hamburger.

Sometimes my wife hugs me when I'm cooking. You can see her doing this here.

Once the hamburger is browned and the onion is cooked (and translucent in appearance), add 2 cups frozen peas. Cook until peas are thawed.

Add 1/3 cup flour and stir it in.

Stir in 2-3 cups milk, depending on how think you like your gravy. I usually ad 2 1/2 cups.

Now you have a white gravy with hamburger and peas.

Our friends, The Lamberts, invited us to their house for desert. We're late, so we will have to put a lid on our dinner and eat it later. Dessert first. Yahoo!

This is Nate and Olga with my wife (my wife is on the left). Nate is a statistics professor. Olga is from Russia. This is why...

...they have two clocks in their library. One with our local time and one with the time of her home town. It's 8:00 P.M. here and 6:00 A.M there. Weird to think, huh?