Chicken Fried Portabellas and Gravy

You will need these items for dinner:

* 2 large portabella caps (or however many or much you want to make!)

* Bread crumbs (or just flour is great too)

* Flour

* Earth balance (my vegan butter) or regular butter

* Olive oil (please be buying good olive oil. Like Italian olive oil. Olive oil that is actually green, eh.)

* Soy milk (or other non-dairy milk or regular milk if you must, if you are set on this being a more serious gravy, you can totally use dairy creamer when i say to use soy milk, this will, in fact, make a real super creamy pretty white gravy that yo mama will faint over)

* Vegetable stock cube

* Fresh ground black pepper and salt ( I always recommend real salt or celtic sea salt)

* Optional – Italian seasoning or rosemary

You should make the gravy before you do the portabella. You want the mushrooms to be served hot and crispy under this gravy.

To start gravy: melt butter (about in saucepan, whisk. Wait, you want to know how much? Crap. I guess about 4 table spoons. Then I add another couple of tablespoons of olive oil to that. I never measure this stuff. Add to this your veggie bullion cube and get it all mixed evenly in the oil. The bullion is not essential, but can add another good layer of flavor to this meatless gravy.

Now slowly add flour and whisk the two together. Add some black pepper now to begin to bring out the flavor with the heat. Keep adding flour until it is like Playdough looking crumbly and weird and you wonder if i am crazy that this could ever turn into gravy. That’s not gravy you lunatic!

I *may* have lost my whisk in a break-up. Hopefully your relationship and your whisk are still intact. If not, remember to keep the whisk girl, you’ll need it.

Once you have attained this clumpy mess that has as much evenly distributed flour within the butter and oil, you will begin to add milk or creamer of your choice… Slowly!!!! Add some, whisk it in, let it heat, add more, whisk it in, allow to heat, again and again. I alternately add milk and water. And you can begin to salt the gravy at these intervals also. This requires tasting the gravy often, which makes standing around stirring for so long rewarding.

The process of adding and whisking: Add milk and water until you have silky gravy that you feel is the right consistency. Note that the minute you set it aside, it will thicken a little further, so when you return to it to serve it in a few minutes, re whisk and be open to adding more milk or water the mushrooms? Easy.

Mix bread crumbs with salt, Italian seasoning, some flour (or just use flour instead of bread crumbs), and black pepper.

Dip mushroom slices or whole cap into milk ( i used almond milk tonight) and then into bread crumbs, and plop those babies into some hot olive oil and fry until perfect brown is approached from stage left. Remove and serve with garlic mashed potatoes (which I will not bother to bore you with a recipe for) and a good veggie.