Last week I asked Martin what he wanted for his special birthday dinner.  His request - Cowboy Food.  I handed him a cowboy cookbook, he flipped it to the middle and put his finger down on the page.  "I want THIS," he told me, pointing to a big plate of Chicken Fried Steak.  "I want Chicken Fried Steak with corn on the cob and a side of parsley."   My boy, always finding ways to fit a little parsley into his diet.

Although the recipe in the cookbook looked good, it looked more like a pan-fried steak with gravy on top than the lightly breaded variety I remember eating in the Texas Hill Country.  I searched online for a recipe, hoping to find that someone had posted the recipe for Chicken Fried Steak from the Rocky Top Cafe in Granite Shoals, TX - which if you ask me, has the best Chicken Fried Steak EVER.  But, no luck, it must be a well-guarded secret.  I found a whole lot of recipes and each one claimed to be the BEST and the ORIGINAL.  I found that there's some debate whether it should be called CHICKEN fried or COUNTRY fried.  But there was one common tie in all the recipes and discussion - the belief that when you eat it you should set aside your healthy eating habits for the day and enjoy without guilt. 

And so we did.  I found a simple recipe for a weiner schnitzel-like version of Chicken Fried Steak, and made a few changes from there.  The result was delicious, fat-laden, and rich.



A few things to note:
- If you make this, I'd recommend that you wait for a balmy day and open the windows wide.  Also, stock up on Fabreeze because your house will smell like the VF minus the smoke and stale beer (unless your house already smells like smoke and stale beer).
- It is not a light meal, and there's really no point in talking about it.  Should you have the desire to "lighten" the meal, you may want to just make something else.
- I made this non-dairy so that Sophie could eat it (although she did not because SHE DID NOT WANT YUCK ON HER STEAK), but if you eat dairy at your house, you could easily substitute any variety of cow's milk for the soy milk used in this recipe. 

Print it: Chicken Fried Steak with Non-Dairy Gravy