The Fungus Among Us (about $4, about 40 minutes including baking time)

Mushrooms are not a fungus. They're flowers. The fungus is underground, and the mushroom is its...

Sigh.

Well, that doesn't make them any more palatable in theory, does it? I mean, is it better to think you're eating a fungus (images flash by: someone's nasty fungal toenail; the gunk in the the crevices between tiles in the shower; the largest living organism on earth, which is now taking over an entire Northwestern state -- should I even go on?)?

Or a penis/uterus (new set of images [and here I avoid the more obvious]: the German cannibal, who started with his consensual victim's you-know-what [which they ate together and pronounced kind of tough] ; Rocky Mountain Oysters (a festival? REALLY?); folks who eat human placenta...really, I should probably stop)?

I know. It's a food blog. This is crazy talk for a food blog.

And yet.

Don't you wonder who first looked at this thing-- grey, a little damp, pushing up out of the dank ground -- looked at it and said, "Effin' YUM! I want me some of that!" -- Because I'm thinking that person was starving OR had already eaten some funny mushrooms. I'm also thinking: probably he died, since so many mushrooms can kill you, the nasty buggers.

So I'm also thinking that the person(s) watching him took notes, sent another idiot out there to try another kind, who fell dead, and so forth until folks found the ones that are really tasty. Because, really good mushrooms are REALLY good.

Like these.

What I have here are stuffed mushroom caps. I use button mushrooms because I can find them readily at the grocery store, but any cap with a sufficiently rounded aspect will do. Just so you can get a hole where the stem is -- and yes, I know -- how to avoid double entendres when you start the way I did, I don't know.

What you need:

About a pound of good-sized mushrooms or just the caps

1/2 c finely chopped walnuts

1/2 c plain bread crumbs

1 1/2 TBSP dried dill

4 oz finely crumbled feta

4 TBSP milk

pepper

2 TBSP olive oil

Oven to 375. Lightly grease a large flat pan. I use a lasagna pan for this.

Mix nuts, bread crumbs, dill, feta and milk. The resulting stuffing will be loose and crumbly. This is right. Don't worry.

Wipe the mushrooms off. Me, I wash them, in violation of all that's sacred about mushroom cleaning, I understand. Alas. But then, I eat a lot less dirt this way.

If the mushrooms still have stems, wiggle them back and forth with your fingers. They should pop right out. Save these in the fridge to chop up in your next soup.

Wash your hands.

With your fingers, lightly press the filling into the cavities of each mushroom. You want enough pressure to compact the stuffing, but not so much that you break the mushroom in half. Experiment. If you break the mushrooms, it's okay: just set the pieces next to each other in the pan and cook them with the rest. They'll look broken but still taste just fine.

You want to make a little heap of stuffing on top of each mushroom. It'll stay together, I promise.

Place each mushroom in the lightly greased pan. They can touch each other if they need to. If not, not. You can ask them about this and explain good and bad touch if you think that's good parenting. If you do, you might consider explaining about death, since -- well, they're headed into the oven, and ultimately into the hydrochloric acid of your gut (okay, I love this site), so I think it's probably fair to say something while you're talking to the mushrooms anyway.

When you've stuffed all the mushrooms -- and I've never done this without having stuffing left over, which freezes just fine -- drizzle them with the olive oil. Use less if you'd like.

Bake the whole thing for about 20 minutes, uncovered. The mushrooms will darken and the stuffing will brown just a little bit. When they're soft enough for your taste, remove from the oven and, waiting so you don't burn your mouth, consume.

There you go.

Jambalaya; Or, The Inauthenticity Continues ($3 or so, when the okra's out of season, cheaper when it's in; about an hour, including the chopping)

It is not okra season. I confess. I bought okra from Honduras. Bad locavore. BAD.

It was just that I had a sort of craving, or maybe it was that someone else had mentioned okra to me, or maybe it was a longing for high, hot summer, the time when okra is in season. I used to grow okra (it was vegetable of the month at the CDC!) when I lived in Athens, more okra than I knew how to eat.

It's not a lovely plant actually, though its flower is really beautiful, a creamy white with a dark burgundy center and bright yellow stamens. And fresh okra, the kind you cut off the plant, carry inside, wash, cut up, sprinkle with corn meal and pan fry -- say twenty minutes max from plant to teeth -- there is nothing like this.

So homesick was I in Wisconsin that I tried to grow okra there, in the richest soil I think any okra plant has ever seen. It never worked. Okra in Georgia gets chest high, neck high -- in Wisconsin it never came to my knees. I had one blossom, and that was frail and short-lived. I missed okra. It was metonymy for the sun, and warmth, and the green, buzzing, bird-filled outdoors that the wasteland of winter in Wisconsin -- all winter, as far as I'm concerned -- denies the world.

So, yesterday, okra. And with okra: vegetarian jambalaya. Sort of. In a way. If this is jambalaya, it's the okra, the roux and the allspice that make it so. And the hot sauce, I suppose.

Here's how to make it. And thanks to Lucy Curzon for the recipe.

What you need:

1/4 cup salad oil

1/3 c white flour

a little olive oil

1 sm onion, chopped small

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

2 bay leaves

3 med carrots, peeled and chopped

3-5 peppers, all colors, chopped to make about 2-3 cups

2 tsp basil

1/2 tsp thyme

1 can diced tomatoes, undrained

2 c okra (about 1/2 a pound), sliced

3 c vegetable stock

1/4 tsp allspice

hot sauce of your choice

Chop everything up and set aside. This makes up fast, so you want simply to be dumping as you go. Make some rice (go there; do this), since that's what you'll be serving this over.

In a small heavy skillet, mix the flour and salad oil. Put this on medium heat and stir frequently. This is your roux, which will complicate the taste of the jambalaya (Hank. Sigh.) and thickens it, too.

In a large stockpot, heat the oil over medium high heat and saute the onions, garlic, bay and up to about a TBSP of either red pepper flakes or jalapeno paste. When the onions have softened and become transparent (this should take a minute or two), add the carrots, peppers, basil, and thyme. Stirring every once and a while so the vegetables don't burn, cook for 5 minutes.

Add tomatoes, okra, stock, and allspice. Stir to combine.

Cover and cook for twenty minutes.

Meanwhile, turn the heat up on the roux and stir constantly. It should begin to turn very dark brown, sort of burned-looking. Keep it moving in the pan. You want it about the color of nicely tanned leather and to smell almost nutty. When you've achieved this, turn the heat off and go do something until the vegetables are cooked.

After twenty minutes, check that the carrots are soft enough (run a fork into the largest piece you can find). If they are, scrape the roux into the vegetables, stirring the vegetables constantly so they don't cook the flour into dumplings. If this happens, it's not a big deal: you just have something less jambalaya than -- I don't know -- quasi-Caribbean vegetable and dumpling stew. Still edible. Still actually pretty tasty (yes, I've done this; that's how I know).

Drape this over some rice, in bowls. Dump on the hot sauce of your choice (classic is Tabasco, but we're real fond of Cholula ourselves). Eat.

There you go.

Bread Made with Bananas (maybe $5, about an hour and forty-five minutes including baking)

When your bananas look like this, it's time either for the Banana Angel to descend, wrap your bananas in a cloud of glory, sing hosannas, and lift them miraculously into banana heaven where they hang, forever green, under the dancing, fat green leaves of their mama tree (which is actually apparently a grass, but well, what does it matter in the banana afterlife?), dreaming of uncorrupted sweetness and sucking eternally at the nectar of banana-mama's sap.

Or it's time they were mashed with a fork and scraped into a batter, poured into a loaf pan, baked at hellish temperatures and incorporated into your mortal cell structure with the accompaniment of much butter.

I wonder if the latter bananas are bad bananas. Is banana bread a kind of fruit hell? Or could we think of it as a kind of limited immortality, a sort of banana limbo, given they get to walk around as you for a while?

Maybe eating banana bread is sort of like allowing banana possession?

This, by the way, is why I'm not in seminary.

Well, it's among SEVERAL reasons I'm not in seminary.

Okay, so when your bananas look like this, and you've consigned them to the hell/limbo that is Banana Bread (after having waited, in vain, for the angels), this is how you do that.

I'm pretty sure this recipe is my maternal grandmother's. I'm absolutely sure this is my mother's recipe. I mean I sort of stole it from her, so yeah, I can be absolutely sure. Probably one or the other of them got it from a magazine.

What you need

• 3 VERY ripe bananas, mashed (should yield about 1 c)
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1/3 c butter, melted and cooled
• 2 eggs
• 3 TBSP sour milk (milk plus a splash of vinegar)
• 2 c white flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup chopped nuts

Grease and flour a loaf pan.

In a separate bowl, combine flour, soda, powder and salt.

In a large bowl, mix sugar, butter, eggs by hand until combined. Stir in milk and bananas until combined. Add flour mixture and combine. Add nuts and combine.

See? EASY.

Pour the whole lot quickly into the loaf pan, and let sit for twenty minutes. Preheat the oven to 350 and bake for about 60 minutes. The loaf is done when a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean. Remove from pan when it's cool enough to handle.

You eat this in slices, slathered with butter.

You'll hear angels singing (not like this, or these guys), I promise.

There you go.

Your Basic Lasagna (about $10/pan; about an hour, including baking)

Did my mother know what ricotta (look! it's easy to make!) is, or was cottage cheese (look! it's hard to make!) just easier to find? It's an eternal question. One that right now you have no context for, I realize, but I'm about to rectify that.

When I was growing up in suburban Florida in the 1970s, my mother made big dishes of lasagna periodically, I think to please my brother who thought lasagna was mana, ambrosia and ichor. In her version, there is a lot of meat, I'd say a pound and a half of ground chuck and/or crumbled sausage, in every pan. Also, Ragu, pre-boiled Mueller's lasagna noodles, and yes: cottage cheese. Large curd. It's possible that's all she had to work with. And yet, it's also possible that such a lasagna could be the emblematic meal of white, middle-class suburban Florida life in the 1970s.

I loved my mother's lasagna, I think largely because my mother's pasta was basically a meat and cheese delivery vehicle, and at that point meat and cheese comprised my entire food pyramid.

When I stopped eating red meat in the 1980s, I started experimenting with my mother's lasagna. I discovered that ricotta is not cottage cheese. I figured out how to make spaghetti sauce on my own a couple of years ago. I stopped boiling the noodles. I added broccoli, squash, eggplant, mushrooms (nothing phallic here), whatever I had at hand. And it worked! Imagine.

Here's what I do at this point: a legacy of Mom's Lasagna, with moves towards something that's sort of more original: it drives a Fiat (or better yet rides a bike), say, and not a minivan full of Adderall-laden blond children in soccor-gear eating Gogurt from squeeze packs while watching DVDs of Disney flicks and singing mindless tunes about Teletubbies.

What you need for two pans*:

*I make two of these and freeze one, unbaked, for days when I can't face cooking. It'll keep for three or more months that way.

**Two small, or one large, carton of actual ricotta (sold near the sour cream, usually) (I'm not sure why)
**Parmesan (real, or shakeable)
**2 eggs
**about 3 quarts of sauce, with vegetables of your choosing already cooked in it
**2 boxes of lasagna noodles (no-boil are fine, if they're as cheap as the other kind, which work just as well)
**about six cups of grated mozzarella (look! It's only moderately difficult to make!)

You'll need two large, square, deep baking pans. Since lasagna's so heavy, I don't recommend disposable ones, unless you're really careful and keep you hand underneath the lasagna when transferring it to and from the oven. Which can be hard when it's a bazillion degrees hot.

In a bowl, mix the ricotta with the eggs and about half a cup of parm. Assemble your ingredients all in one place.

On the bottom of the first pan, put a large ladle-ful of sauce. Shake the pan to distribute it. Note: after this step, I sometimes mix up the order things go in. It makes no difference at all, so long as you're alternating the layers.

Then lay down a layer of noodles. They can touch and even overlap a little (see illustration). If you're using short noodles, they'll run vertically across the pan, not horizontally. Which you could probably have figured out without my saying so.

Drop about a quarter of the ricotta mixture in spoonfuls on top of the noodles. Sprinkle on a handful of parm, then about a cup of mozz. I think of this as looking like a hard, but not drifty, snow. You should be able to see forms clearly under it.

Add another layer of noodles, pressing down lightly, then put in about enough sauce to cover everything generously, then ricotta, parm and mozz.

Add another layer of noodles, then, since you should be at or near the top of your pan, layer in noodles, NO ricotta (though here I used some because I had extra), parm, and sprinkle the top with mozz.

Move to the next pan and repeat. Cover it with foil and freeze.

Heat the oven to 350. Bake, covered, for about 20 minutes. Remove cover and bake until the mozz is brown, the edges are visibly bubbling, and the house smells like a pizza parlor. Remove from oven -- and this is crucial: LET IT SIT FOR TEN MINUTES AT LEAST. This will absorb the extra sauce and cook the noodles. The reason there's not a finish picture of the baked stuff here is that SOME people in my house don't wait well.

There you go.

Cream Puffs are Not for Every Day (maybe $3, about 45 minutes)

The danger here is that you will eat them all.

I know, having womanfully tried to resist. Then halved the recipe, having failed. Then quartered it, having failed again.

Now I just make these for VERY special occasions, and say: oh, what the hell. Better to die relatively quickly of a heart attack with the taste of cream puffs on my tongue than cream-puff-less, shriveled, incontinent, and telling lewd stories from what I can remember of my past to no one, lying in some vomit-colored vinyl recliner in a nursing home where no one really cares about me because I've outlived all my lovers who died, sated on my cream puffs, of heart attacks. Like we all should.

The recipe, like all good recipes, calls for real butter and actual eggs. Don't substitute. Live instead.

I tend to fill these with flavored custard, but traditionally they're filled with whipped cream. Great gobs of REAL whipped cream. Not Cool-Whip, not that shit that comes in a can and if you suck it right, can make you high. What is that? Jet-whip? [No, it's Reddi-wip. GAH. Their website burned my retina! And what is that SOUND??] I think it's made of recycled plastic. Anyway, buy heavy cream, add a little sugar, whip it with an electric mixer until it's stiff. When you bite these, you should have whipped cream all over your face.

Which is, incidentally, why Chuck eats his with a fork.

Another note: fill these only minutes before serving. Don't fill beforehand. They get soggy fast.

What you need:

1 c water

1 stick of UNSALTED butter

1/2 tsp salt

1 c white flour

4 eggs

In a saucepan, melt butter with water, and bring to a boil.

Remove from heat and add salt and flour, stirring quickly. This will thicken immediately into a weird, doughy paste.

That's exactly right. Return to heat and, stirring constantly, cook for one minute. If you don't, your CPs won't taste right.

Cool completely to room temperature (so you don't cook the eggs when you add them).

Using an electric mixer, or upper arm strength equivalent to four hefty dudes who work construction (trust me on this one), beat each of the eggs into the dough, one at a time. They should be completely incorporated, and the dough should be consistently shiny.

Spoon into about a dozen mounds onto a greased cookie sheet. [Note: these EXPAND, so use two sheets if you have to.] I use two spoons to drop these, like doing cookie dough, then slop them into piles. The dough should be sort of worrisomely slick and loose. It's okay. Keep going.

Bake at 450 degrees for 15 minutes. Turn heat down to 350 degrees and prop the oven slightly open for a few seconds to help it cool. Close the oven and bake at 350 for another 20-25 minutes, until the puffs are golden all over.

Cool completely and halve, giving yourself a top and bottom (not a right and left). Remove any soft bits inside. Eat these greedily, since they are extremely tasty; or, be holier than thou and give them to the dog, who will love you forever after, more ardently than before.

Fill with custard, whipped cream, icing, whatever; put the top back on and shake some confectioner's sugar over the top, if you like overkill. Try not to eat all of them. Let me know how that works.

There you go.

Soup with Strange Ingredients like Peanut Butter (maybe $3 for a potful; about 45 minutes)

I forgot to ask Santa for an immersion blender (immersion blender discussion, no less). It was an incredible oversight on my part. I have hopes, though, that with my birthday coming up, he'll make a little flight to Georgia next month and correct things.

But seriously folks. Why do any of us have to write letters? Isn't it sort of pathetic, and -- I don't know -- a little condescending? I mean, shouldn't we expect the jolly old ELF (not quite what Santa has in mind), a supernatural being who can fly and deliver presents all over the world in a single freaking night, to be a little, well, psychic?

Why couldn't he have looked into my mind, or more importantly my cupboard, and noted that I didn't have one and might find one useful?

I don't know. Might be I was on his naughty list. It's possible. Actually, it's likely, even.

In the meantime, I'm making do, and though an immersion blender would be handy for this recipe, if you don't have one, a regular blender or a food processor does fine if you're careful with hot soup.

Specifically, hot sweet potato peanut soup, loosely -- okay, INCREDIBLY loosely -- based on some soup I had years ago at a friend's house. His was loosely African, I think. But as he was a Jesuit priest cum English professor from Wisconsin -- well, it's probably mostly Midwestern.

What you'll need:

A stock pot or large sauce pot

a blender or food processor

oil

small onion, diced tiny (grated is better)

garlic

fresh ginger

cayenne

1 tsp salt

1 tsp cumin

1 tsp coriander

1/4 tsp cinnamon

pinch of ground cloves

1/4 c crushed tomatoes

1 carrot, peeled and diced

1 lb sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped into 2" pieces (in this version I photographed I baked them first [because I thought I was making something else], but you don't have to)

2 1/2 cup water

1/4 cup heavy cream

1 1/2 TBSP chunky peanut butter (no sugar added is best)

chopped peanuts

cilantro and chopped peanuts for garnish

This is a pretty mild dish. Add more cayenne or chili powder to give it more heat if you like that.

In the stock pot, heat about a TBSP of oil until shimmering. Saute about two cloves of garlic and the onion in this, just for a minute or two.

Add spices and cook one minute longer.

Add tomatoes and sweet potato. Stir and cook for two more minutes.

Add water and turn up heat until liquid simmers. Cook for 20 minutes or until the sweet potatoes fall apart when prodded with a fork.

CAREFULLY blend or process smooth. Return to pot if necessary. Stir in cream and peanut butter over low heat. When you serve it, sprinkle on a little cilantro and some chopped peanuts.

There you go.

Easy Mac (less than $2; about 15 minutes)

Seriously. Does anyone know what that orange powder is that comes in a box of mac and cheese you buy when you need comfort food?

Specifically, where the hell does the orange come from? It's neon, it's weird, it probably sneaks around in your cupboard at night, inviting the marshmallow cream to help out in its seduction of the brownie mix. It probably has one of those round, rotating beds. It probably listens to Al Green and wears necklaces with Italian horns on them. Honestly, it probably needs a good two weeks of penicillin. I mean, who knows what it's bringing to the table? Could be anyone. Could be anything.

I like orange. I wear a lot of orange. This orange just frightens the bejesus out of me.

Hence: easy mac, homemade. It's white. And, aside from what might be hiding in the white (by which I mean in the parm, the milk, the canola, or the pasta), you know what you're eating.

I guess ideally you'd make your own parm from the milk you got from your own cow/sheep; your own oil from your own canolas (canolis? Does anyone know what a canola is? [okay, CANada + Oil + a? Really?]); and make your own pasta from wheat grown on your own property, from dirt you made -- and from eggs you harvested from your own chickens whom you feed with your own scratch -- and from whatever else you might decide you can gather from around you, unpolluted by the touch of other people's diabolical plans to poison you with neon-orange additives.

But let's say that for the time being, we're just going to move one step closer to controlling ingredients. And that this is, in fact, as easy or easier that that box mac you ingest, or give your kids to ingest, on any given day.

Here's what you'll want. This will feed at least four people as a meal.

Large sauce pot

pound of pasta, any shape. Flat pasta cooks faster than pasta that's bunchy. The fastest is angel hair. The slowest I've found is gemelli.

some parmesan, any sort -- even (and here's how you can tell this is not a gourmet recipe) the stuff in a shake jar.

A little milk.

a little oil.

That's it.

Okay, boil the pasta until it's the tenderness you like it. My Nana complains that Americans eat their pasta raw (which is her word for al dente); I say, if you want to chew, undercook. If you want to gum and slide for your mastication, have at it.

If you've never boiled pasta before, the rule is a LOT of water. Pasta needs to swim, so cover it and then some. Boil the water, add the pasta. Keep it boiling until it's done.

Drain the pasta and shake it to clear all the water. Return it to the warm pot. Drizzle on some oil, maybe a TBSP. Splash in some milk, less than a 1/4 cup. If you want some herbs, try a little oregano. Also, you can weaponize with jalapeno paste; just stir it in at this point.

Keep the pot, and the pasta, warm if you need to on a VERY LOW heat. Mix so all the pasta's coated. Put some parm on it, maybe a 1/4 cup max. Stir once or twice, very lightly.

Do this again and again until when you stir, you don't see milk puddling in the bottom of the pan.

Parm is funny and can clump, so you don't want to over-stir. If it clumps, peel that part off the spoon, eat it, and keep going. Add a little more milk if you think the pasta's not coated to your liking.

The finest meal-variation of this is to add peas to the boiling water. Pasta Parm Peas is what I used to call it. You can also add shrimp or chicken. If you do, you get to name it.

There you go.

Because You Can Never Get Enough Squash in Your Dessert (maybe $10 for a whole pan; about 40 minutes)

These are pumpkin-based dessert objects that I could sit and eat forever, except that if I did I would also feel shame forever, have to go to my first confession (this is a story [not by Frank O'Connor] for another time), and spend too much time atoning.

That Catholic thing never leaves you. The Jesuits were right. I haven't been to mass since the last Catholic dead person forced me there, but I still get the guilties, just like the good nuns told me I would. Or Jiminy Cricket. Sometimes I get the two confused.

On the other hand, being a mother the BVM would likely appreciate that I am eating my vegetables and fruit, even if they do come looking like something intensely bad for you.

What I have for you today, the day before I have to step back into the classroom and try to justify what I love best (writing, reading, and not stock-reports), is Pumpkin Treats. They're very modified versions of BH&G's Pumpkin Bars, over which the BVM would weep if she could read English, given the sugar and oil and such.

[Hey, when you get bodily taken up to heaven, do you think you get to learn everything? Like, say, reading -- since I'm betting good money (drachmas? talents? shekls?) that the wife of a carpenter in Nazareth during Roman times was illiterate. Or, say, what the hell a pumpkin is, since I don't know if they grew ditto. Or, say, how come the word pumpkin, a nice enough word, gets all cutesified by people in the throes of sentimentalism over children, wives, dogs, what have you.]

What you need:

lasagna pan or large lasagna-pan type baking dish, lightly greased (I use spray-grease)

2 c flour

1/4 c sugar

2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp cloves (ground)

4 eggs, beaten

1 can pumpkin (15 oz)

1/8 c oil

1 cup applesauce, preferably home-made. This way you get chunks and not much sugar.

Preheat oven to 350.

In a large bowl, combine dry ingredients (on the list, everything through cloves). In a separate bowl, combine the wet stuff. Pour wet stuff into the dry stuff, and mix thoroughly, then pour into greased lasagna pan. Smooth out lightly with a spatula.

Bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool and cut into squares. Try not to eat six at a time. I bet you can't.

The original recipe calls for frosting these with cream cheese icing. Gilding the lily, I say, but if you want to, gild away.

There you go.

Chicken, Peas, White Sauce (under $10; about 15 minutes)

This is not really Chicken ala King. I've looked it up. That dish is way harder. This you can do in your sleep almost. So if you want ACTUAL Chicken ala King, sorry.

I made a big pot of this stuff for a grieving friend recently, called it "chicken in white sauce with peas and biscuits." She said, "Oh, you mean Chicken ala King." I nodded. Um, okay. If you say so.

That may be the first time I heard anyone call it that. I never called it anything, just fixed it, served it, and let it talk for itself. So yeah. Chicken ala King. Whatev.

I don't know where I first ate it or how to cook it. It must have come in a dream. Like this dream where I make a basic white sauce, add some cooked chicken and peas, and drape it over some biscuits. That dream.

Here's what you need:

4 TBSP oil or melted butter

4 TBSP flour

milk

about a pound of cooked chicken, diced into bite-sized pieces (I shred mine)

some frozen peas, maybe a cup

biscuits

thyme, a couple of bay leaves, and a little nutmeg. Or you could use a little sage, I guess. I tend to like thyme.

Pour out about six cups of milk so that it's ready when you need it.

In a large stockpot, heat oil with flour over medium for 2 minutes (this is called making a roux).

Add milk all at once. I use a whisk at this stage to get the roux to break up smoothly in the milk. Otherwise I tend to get sauce with mini-dumplings.

Whisk smooth. Add the bay leaves when you start cooking the milk so they have time to flavor the sauce. Cook over medium to medium-high heat, stirring with a regular spoon very often (otherwise you'll burn the milk and have to start over) until it bubbles and thickens.

NOTE: if it doesn't thicken after it starts boiling, take another TBSP of flour in a container you can close and shake. Add 1/2 c water and about 1/4 c of the hot liquid to the flour. Shake until smooth, add to the boiling milk. Bring to a boil again and wait five minutes at boiling. If that doesn't work, do it again. Usually, however, one time works fine.

Once it's thickened, you can add flour to make it thicker using the method above, or add a little more milk to thin it out if you like your sauce thinner.

Add about a TBSP of thyme, and sprinkle some nutmeg over the top and stir in. I tend to just lightly sprinkle the surface with nutmeg. You should taste now, and add salt and pepper if necessary. If you like yours weaponized, now is the time to add jalapeno mash.

Add peas and chicken. Stir and warm them.

Serve over halved biscuits. There's a biscuit recipe on this site -- I think in December 2009 somewhere. Should be easy to find.

There you go.