Gaudere wrote:
I hope I can catch you on the rebound. Could you give me some idea of how long to cook it? I’ve cooked it for up to five minutes, and the problem is that the grease-flour browns, but I like my sausage gravy white. Thanks for your help.
You should only need to cook the flour for about 60 seconds Lib to get rid of the “floury” taste - the only reason you would cook it longer than that is to get the colour, which is exactly what you don’t want if you like your gravy white.
Are you perhaps cooking the flour on high? Or maybe leaving too much fat in the pan. A pretty good rule of thumb is two tablespoons of plain flour to one tablespoon of fat. Usually, you make gravy with vegetable water or stock, not milk.
If you have a microwave, you can make gravy in a microwave jug - which might solve both the floury taste and the colour problem.
And if you’re making gravy for sausages, don’t forget to include the red wine and mustard.
Mmmmm.
It’s a lot harder making veggie gravy. You have to use about a zillion onions. My hands always smell for about 3 days afterwards.
pan
Unless you’re really trying to make the baby jesus weep, I reckon you’d be looking to make a roux.
Well, that was rouxd.
Ooh, that was bad. Which is good.
If it’s easier for me to make, doesn’t cost more than the “real deal,” and tastes good or great to me, then what’s the problem?
Shouldnt you be in the free food thread, supporting the poor downtrodden?
One secret to making instant mashed potatoes taste good is to first, toss out the instructions that come with them. Use whole milk or 2% instead of water, and add about a tablespoon of butter. Not margarine MMMMMmmmmmmm.
Wasn’t it George Carlin who had a routine about slapping two unrelated things together and being able to sell it a twice the prize the two things would have brought separately?
Fer crying out loud, DDG, it’s a marketing ploy. If item one (Instant MP) goes for $1.99 and Item two (gravy) goes for $2.99, Lipton can sell it for $5.29, since comapering prices is a little harder if you don’t have exactly the same size container and type of product. If they’re really smart, They’ll make the container of gravy 20% smaller than the one costing $2.99 and sell the “kit” for $4.89 - Cheaper!!!
Also - if Lipton makes Instant MP and Heinz make gravy, Lipton can now sell both items, taking business away from Heinz.
So now, Bill Consumer is cruising down the counter in his local 24/7 supermarket. He comes upon a big stack of the Lipton “kit” and thinks “Hmm… I was gonna get that. And it’s on sale too.” He looks over on the shelf and sees that The Other Brand is gonna cost more, and he can throw the whole “kit” in his shopping cart and not bother going looking for gravy.
Smart of Lipton, and Bill Consumer is not really stupid or lazy.
Imagine - a jerk from socialist Sweden teaching an American about basic marketing and capitalism.
I know it’s just a marketing ploy. My rant is directed towards those people who fall for the marketing ploy.
All people who unthinkingly fall for a marketing ploy are, IMO, by definition “stupid” AND “lazy”. Bill Consumer, with his impulse-buying, especially his buying the product that’s presented in the end-of-aisle impulse-item displays, and his falling for the cleverly packaged yet secretly more expensive deal, is “stupid” and “lazy”.
There is no “other brand” of mashed-potatoes-and-gravy kit, at least, not so far, thank the Invisible Pink Unicorn.
Wow, I really can’t contemplate the urge to eat instant mashed potatoes or canned gravy, period. They’re nasty, no matter how you cook them! If I don’t have the time or the inclination to peel, boil, and mash actual potatoes, I just eat something else (frequently rice or pasta…no peeling or mashing required!).
The idea of a “kit” for this…well, I can’t decide whether it’s sad, terrifying, or hilarious.
??? Did you even read the earlier posts? Everyone is already aware its a marketing ploy. That’s basically the reason for the whole rant.
What a waste of perfectly good cheese!
Fenris
You had pre-salted peanuts? And a hammer??
We would have killed for a hammer.
We only had a small pile of salt, peanuts in the shell and our bare hands.
Fenris
I come from a house where as soon as you were old enough to open the pantry door, you were making your own breakfast. This was partly because my mum wanted to sleep in, and partly because she’s not the best cook in the world.
Today I’m having Butternut squash risotto for lunch at work. My co-workers hate me 
Doh. Of course I did. Apart from the tangent about Instant vs. Home made, and another about PB&J, there weren’t all that much refuting going on.
So, DDG, remind me never going grocery shopping with you, becuse if you get this upset from one marketing ploy, I wouldn’t want to know what you’re like after filling your shopping cart.
What exactly is the ploy here? Does the product mislead people into thinking they’re getting real mashed potatoes and gravy?
It would have no success whatsoever as a product if people bought it thinking it was one thing and then found out it was quite another when they got it home. At best, these people would buy the thing once and once only. You make it sound like the marketers are employing some kind of cheap trick, and those who “fall” for it are complete nitwits. Never mind the fact that there are plenty of people who like this kind of food, prepared in exactly this manner - some have even posted in this thread.
You left out scrambling the eggs, greasing the pan, washing your hands to remove any salmonella traces from your hands, and washing the wire wisk, spatula, fork, knife (if you put butter in the pan), plate, and bowl that you scrambled the eggs in, and drying and putting all those items away.
I’m not ranting about convenience foods as such. I love convenience foods. I’m sitting here eating turkey with Heinz Fat-Free Roasted Turkey Gravy out of a jar poured over it. It’s the kit that bugs me.
The marketing ploy is twofold. First, that you’re paying a great deal more for unnecessary special re-packaging of food substances that individually are among the cheapest convenience foods known to man. The big box of instant mashed potatoes costs about $3.00 and the packet of instant gravy mix is about 79 cents. The 26.7 ounce box of Hungry Jack that I have here says it makes about 34 servings, so that’s about 10 cents a serving, and the packet of gravy usually makes a cup of gravy, which you could figure would be four servings, or 20 cents a serving. So for one serving that’s 30 cents worth of mashed potato and gravy, and I haven’t looked at the Kit that closely, but I’m betting it works out at quite a bit more. You always pay for packaging, for one thing.
But–it’s just the whole idea of the “kit” that I find silly. Just plain silly. And that’s the second half of the ploy–this is obviously just the next logical step in food marketing aimed at the Tired ‘N’ Hungry Working Parent. She stops by Wal-Mart on the way home from work to pick up something for supper, sees this mashed-potato-and-gravy “kit” on the end of the aisle, and since she’s tired and hungry and her decision-making capability is impaired, she thinks, “Oh, mashed potatoes and gravy” and she grabs one to go along with her boneless skinless chicken breasts. (Not that I have anything against those, they’re lovely).
So I’m not saying, “Everybody who buys one of these is a nitwit.” I understand that there may be intelligent people out there who make calm, rational decisions to take one of these kits home, and to them I say, “Hey, go for it, chacun a son gout, y’all.” But I think that the majority of the people who buy these don’t think about it. I think it’s another in a series of items that don’t really fill a market niche or need–they’re only offered as impulse item “food-as-toy” or “food-as-entertainment”, like Go-Gurt. It isn’t about “eating”, it’s about “playing with the gadget”. Pop open the cute little lids, etc.
Because if they stopped and thought about it for a minute, they’d make a quick trip down to the Instant Mashed Potato aisle, and then swing by the Gravy Packages on the way out, and if they grabbed a handful of gravy packets, and got the big box of mashed p., they’d be set for at least five or six meals, instead of “just for tonight”. And a lot cheaper, too.
I thought instant Lipton iced tea in a can was silly, too. What, you can’t buy a big jar of powdered “stuff” and mix it in a glass as needed?