Gary V. Powell, Author

My seven year-old son will never understand. Well, maybe he will, because I’ll keep on him until he does.

We took our annual road trip to Chicago to visit family last week—even with $4.00 gas it’s cheaper to drive than fly. Along the way, we stopped in places like Asheville, North Carolina, Berea Kentucky, Bloomington and Elkhart, Indiana. Notwithstanding my son’s penchant for “kid meals” and plastic toys served up alongside smashed burgers and soggy fries at the usual fast-food havens, I resisted with a passion, choosing instead the Moose Café, the Daniel Boone Inn, the Malibu Grille, and the Cozy Corner.

It’s harder and harder to find roadside cafes, diners, and truck stops, real places owned by local owners serving authentic food, but I do my darnedest.

Part of the reason is that I’m a nostalgic guy who remembers the trips I took with my family when I was a kid. Part of the reason is that even at age 57 I’m still a bit of a 1960’s hippie at heart and my gag reflex kicks in when confronted with corporate anything, especially corporate food—that stuff raised on corporate farms, processed in corporate plants, and cooked in corporate grease.

I’ll take an open-faced roast-beef sandwich over a Big Mac any day of the week. I’ll take a time-worn waitress named Rita who calls me honey over a nineteen year-old Bri with gleaming white teeth anytime.

Chicken-Fried Anything

When I was a kid, we’d load up the pink 1958 Buick—yeah, it really was pink—and depart that no-man’s land of Michiana for West Plains, Missouri and the Ozarks where my folks’ family hailed from. In those days, Route 66 was the main link between north and south, east and west. We followed it out of Chicago through downstate Illinois and across the river in Cairo.

Truck stops, real truck stops, were so named because that’s where the guys who drove the eighteen wheelers stopped to eat. If you dared call yourself a truck stop you had better deliver the goods—large portions of hearty fare at a reasonable price. We knew a place in Effingham where the roast turkey melted in your mouth and the biscuits and gravy stuck to your ribs. Further down the road in Cairo was a diner that served home-made cherry pie ala mode. Right outside of Rolla, across from the Sleep-Tight Motel, you could enjoy milkshakes thick as molasses made before your eyes. They topped them off with real whipped cream and a fat, red Maraschino cherry. Man, I loved those cherries.

Diners could always get burgers and fries—oversized, juicy burgers topped with fresh lettuce, big old tomatoes, and thick onion slices—but we usually opted for the “blue-plate specials.” They really were served on blue and white plates and were whole meals—what chefs today refer to as “composed dishes.” The starch was invariably a pile of creamy mashed potatoes and the vegetable usually green beans. For protein you had a choice of turkey, pot roast, meat loaf, fried chicken, country ham, or my favorite, chicken-fried steak. Sometimes you got bread and a salad on the side. You always got gravy.

Blue-Plate Wednesdays

My personal chef business offers fancier fare to clients, but Wednesdays around the Powell house are for blue-plate specials. I really use blue plates. Here’s how I serve up my chicken-fried steak:

Ingredients

1 pound of “chopped steak” (round steak cut into 4 squares and pounded with a meat tenderizer)

4 tablespoons of flour

2 tablespoons of vegetable oil

1 tablespoons of butter

Salt and pepper to taste

Preparation

Dredge the meat in the flour, shaking off the excess

Heat the oil in a skillet until hot—add the pat of butter and heat until it melts and foams

Add the steaks and fry on both sides until brown.

Serve with mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans.

Make your own gravy, if you’re up for it. It’s pretty easy.

The most basic gravy involves removing the steaks from the skillet and de-glazing with water, stock, and/or some other liquid—wine comes to mind—scraping up the brown bits, then adding flour and stirring like crazy to get the lumps out. I add a tablespoon of two of veal or beef demiglace, purchased at Williams and Sonoma.

I can't wait till Wednesday night.