Food: Fried Chicken and Gravy

So, today, I decided to do something different for dinner. I dropped by the grocery, and bought ingredients for.....

Fried chicken, gravy, and mashed potato.

(Note to people who do not know me personally: I don't know how to cook, and I am not particularly talented when it comes to anything kitchen-related.)

I dropped the mashed potato idea for tonight.

I bought two kinds of breading mixes: McCormick's lemon and pepper, and Crispy Fry original. I liked how both tasted, although the former was obviously tastier.

After frying the chicken (note: I managed not to burn it), I tried making home-made gravy. I saw a recipe on the web.

Grabe. I was glad my housemate was there to rescue me. I didn't know what to do with the chicken broth, and why my gravy wasn't turning sticky. We decided to put a bit more cornstarch.

Now, I did not take a photo of it, but here's how it looked. Do you remember those pastes in colored tubes which we used to have in preschool? It looked like that, only this one's yellow. Yes, yellow (because of the chicken cubes) and not your KFC/Jollibee/McDonald brown gravy.

I wouldn't really mind the look, if only it tasted like gravy. But imagine your noodle soup, where you placed too little water. That would be very salty. Or imagine broth cubes dissolved in less than the prescribed amount of water. My gravy tasted like chicken broth cubes dissolved in too little water. It was VERY, VERY salty.

So to put all the description together: My homemade gravy was a yellow, really sticky liquid which tasted like chicken broth cubes dissolved in very little water. With a dash of pepper.

I decided to give it another try. I found another recipe on the web. The end product was almost like the first one, except that while the first was consistently sticky, this one was even sticker and lumpy. (When I had to throw away my first gravy, I simply poured it in the kitchen sink. The second gravy I had to throw in the biodegradable garbage can. It was so sticky and lumpy it would clog our sink.)

The third gravy was the closest I got to a real, commercial gravy. It was very light brown in color. The consistency was just right. But my housemate told me it was walang lasa. It was bland.

I love gravy. I think I'll try this again next time. But I'll have a gravy mix too, in case the homemade recipe is again a flop.