Who's Down with OGD? Yeah, You Know Me!

This post is a tribute to my Grandma Markelz, The Original Grandma Donna, who taught me the basis for this recipe. She calls hers Chicken a la King, and it is infinitely fancier and harder than my version, but you can't improve perfection, so I didn't try.

BONUS: If you stick around after the recipe, there's a treat for you. A little unpublished tale I told Ira Glass — not in person, but hey, email's a close second, right? — in an application for This American Life. No, I didn't get an interview, but I got this great personal story, which i probably would not have penned without the impetus. Fittingly, it's about the above-mentioned OGD. She's sounds and looks like a different person these days, and you'll read why, but she's still one of the strongest, toughest ladies I know.

What You'll Need

• Chicken (white or dark, but dark works and tastes better)
• Carrots
• Peas
• Onion
• Potatoes
• Heavy whipping cream
• Chicken broth
• Butter
• Salt
• Pepper
• Garlic powder
• Olive oil
• Buttermilk biscuits

How to Do It

1. You want to begin by roasting your chicken and getting it to that fall-off-the-bone state. This takes about 2 hours in the oven, but if you're pressed for time, you can just cook it through. Season it with the salt, pepper and garlic powder and if you like other spices that sound good (rosemary, thyme, oregano) you can add those, too.
2. Place it in a roasting pan with a lid and drizzle some olive oil on it. Put a little pad of butter on top — you don't need to go Paula Deen on this — to add some flavor.
3. Bake the chicken for 1 hour on 350. You can leave it for another hour at 220 to get it tender.
4. Put your biscuits in the oven. Watch out for those spoon-open cans; they'll get you worse than a jack-in-the-box every time.
5. Chop up your carrots, onion and potato. This is all by portion size and taste. I generally like a half onion for one person and 1-2 carrots. You want to sweat these, along with the peas, in a pot with 1 Tbl of oil on the bottom. Just get them tender, then set aside.
6. Add chicken broth to the veggies and get it simmering. I used about a half a cup of broth for one person and two pieces of dark meat.
7. When the chicken has cooked and cooled — make sure it's not hot, unless you lost the feeling in your fingers in an unfortunate accident and have awesome pain tolerance — and tear the chicken from the bones in a shredding motion. Two forks going in opposite directions works well.
8. add the chicken to the veggie soup pot and pour in any drippings left in the roasting pan. Add in half the amount of cream as broth, for me that's about 1/4 cup. Let it continue to simmer until it gets a little thick like gravy.
9. Add more spices if it's too bland. You want it to have a buttery, salty taste, but be able to taste the cream as well, so if it's too thin, add more cream.
10. Serve over the biscuits or side-by-side as show in the loverly photo above.

Okay, folks, here it is. Thanks for sticking around or for checking this post out solely for this story. And now, a little look into the eccentric life of Donna Markelz:

Last Christmas Eve, my father’s side of the family tried something different. We congregated at my cousin Tony and his wife Joanna’s new house — all 33 of us, not including the dog and one baby on the way. Despite the full house, one person was missing, and she was the reason we weren’t celebrating on the other side of town. My grandma, Donna, was lying in a hospital bed stuck with tubes and surrounded by beeping monitors. She had suffered a series of strokes three months earlier.

Christmas Eve had always been her night. For years she’d spoiled us with lobster and pasta, but not before a full spread of hors d'oeuvres, enough to fill up on. As a child of the Depression, food was sacrosanct to her. She used to tell us her after-school snack was a raw potato. We never figured out why she couldn’t have cooked it, but that wasn’t the point. Her life’s goal was to feed her family, and she more than succeeded. Each year we’d race from 4 p.m. Mass to relieve her anxiety that the food was getting cold.

In Grandma’s absence, my cousin Liz, her fiancé and I volunteered for the tall order of appetizer duties. When everyone bit into their first spatini — a delicacy whose recipe Grandma didn’t share with outsiders in case one of us opened a restaurant — the three of us finally understood Grandma and her holiday neurosis. We learned how Christmas chaos could make you crazy. It’s the mad dash to cook and serve 180 finger foods in an hour. The pressure of 30-plus grumbling guts. The need to please. The exhaustion when it’s over.

After eating ourselves into a well-deserved stupor and loosening up with a few drinks, Joanna, an art teacher, brought out an easel and suggested a game of Pictionary. We certainly had never played games on the holiest night of the year before; usually we just shouted “It’s what you wanted!” at each other as we opened gifts of socks and re-gifted blenders. But a competitive guessing game offered an equivalent opportunity for yelling, so we divided into teams willingly. Not five minutes into the game, accusatory fingers were shaking as jeers of “Cheater!” filled the house. Word to the wise: a room full of imbibing Germans and Italians does not make for a clean fight.

When it was my turn to step up to the easel, I took my paper from the designated word writers. Upon unfolding the slip, a distinct memory came to mind. The paper read “Dr. Wall,” and to any other family, that would not have satisfied the Christmas theme of the game. But to us, it couldn’t mean anything else.

My dad is a notorious gift-returner, and I am proud to say that one of the only Christmas gifts he ever kept, I picked out. About five years ago, his sister, my aunt Denise, asked my advice, and for once, I knew what to say: he wanted a portrait titled “An American Girl in Italy,” an iconic Ruth Orkin depicting a woman walking through a throng of leering Italian men — one of them clutching his crotch. She ordered the photo from Deck the Walls, a franchised art store. About a week before Christmas that year, Grandma answered the phone when the order came in. Denise wasn’t home, so she took a message. Keep in mind, this is the same woman who carried on full conversations with robo-calls, so it shouldn’t have surprised us that she misheard the clerk. Nevertheless, for days the message baffled my aunt. Who was “Dr. Wall,” and what order had she placed with him?

To this day we still laugh when we see a Deck the Walls store. When I drew a doctor and my best attempt at a cube with an arrow pointing at one side, I knew it wouldn’t take long for someone to understand the clue. Liz and I locked eyes, she shouted the answer, and the room went to pieces with laughter. If you had taken a picture of our family in that moment, you wouldn’t have known there was anything wrong. Grandma had been entertaining us for years with her cooking, and she continued to entertain us in our memories.

This story is special to me because it reminds me of the incredible warmth that filled me and that room on our first Christmas Eve without Grandma. I have always been a traditionalist, and that night, though we made new traditions, we honored the old.