Cooking Comes Easy

Cooking has always been second nature with me. I was raised in a home with three women, all of whom had their specialty area. My Mother was a meat and potatoes kind of girl and my Aunt Emma did all our baking. I wish now I had watched her closely, but I was more interested in the finished product than how to put it together. Granny was somewhere in the middle when it came to cooking. She did a little of it all.

We had a flour bin that held at least 20 lbs. flour and back then, everything was cooked with 100% pure lard. They bought lard by the 20 lb. can. We kept chickens and had a garden every summer. Aunt Annie and Uncle Jim lived just up the road and they had a small farm where we got milk, cream and butter regularly. Every year Uncle Jim would butcher a hog and everyone would have fresh pork for a while.

I was around food everyday. If someone wasn't cooking, they were talking about it. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was picking up cooking pointers before I was 10. I do not claim to be a chef or even a cook, but cooking comes easy and natural for me. I don't know any fancy recipes and my culinary education is 0, but I can do some down home cookin' that'll make you wanna slap your momma.

It is amazing to me that there are people in the world who cannot warm a can of soup without directions or fry an egg without a recipe. I have never written down the first recipe. I guess that will change as I continue to update this blog. It's just that I find cooking to be so elementary..

The four basic styles of cooking I use are, boil, fry, bake or grill. In order to prepare any type of food, all I need is a vehicle (pot, pan, dish or grill), seasoning (salt and pepper) and heat. The other ingredients will depend on what I decide to cook and how I'm going to cook it.

The most recent thing I've cooked was Chicken and Dumplins. Now like I said from the very beginning, the things I cook are relatively simple. I did not watch Aunt Emma when she rolled out that dough for dumplins so I rely on the No Yoke pasta dumplins from the store.

Chicken and Dumplins - Easy

INGREDIENTS:

1 - 3.5 - 4.5 lb. chicken  cut-up
1 - Bag of No Yoke Dumplins Lg.
Salt and pepper

PREPARATION:

Wash the chicken leaving the skin and bone in tack. Place chicken in large pot. Add enough water to cover the chicken about one inch. Bring the chicken to a rapid boil, reduce the heat, cover and simmer for 1.5 - 2.5 hours or until the chicken is falling off the bone.

Remove the chicken from the broth and place in a large bowl. Allow the chicken to cool at least 5 minutes before you start separating the skin from the meat and the meat from the bone. Once you have separated the lean meat, place it back in the broth. Make sure you break up any large pieces of chicken. Bring the broth back to a medium boil.

Now add the whole bag of No Yoke Dumplins. Season with two teaspoons each of salt and pepper. Follow directions on the bag of dumplins. Stir the pot every so often. When the dumplins are tender the dinner is ready.