Chicken Fried Steak

I am very close with a friend of mine named Jo Ann. We met when she joined our local Apple Club and hit it off right away. We became fast friends with so much in common. Our friendship rocked along for several years and then she moved away when her husband Jim got transferred. About the same time was when Ben had his accident and I suddenly had a full time husband with a tremendous amount of care needed. This was before email so we wrote each other letters. In one letter, Jo Ann told me what a pain Jim had been for several days and was a bit ticked at him. She told me that she had figured a legal way to kill off our husbands and no one would be the wiser: Just feed them the foods they wanted and we would kill them off slowly by clogging their arteries. No one would ever suspect! She then added that as a matter of fact, she was going to make chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes and gravy that night!

Well, shortly afterwards both Jim and Ben started opening and reading our letters to each other. We had no privacy! No way to gripe about the stupid stuff our husbands did which is what most women do....is a way of relieving the stress and laughing. Men have no idea how stupid they can be and we women have mountains of things to laugh at when the subject gets to rolling...but that's another story. So....in one of her letters, she closed it by writing, 'I'm making chicken fried steak tonight' and gave me a fatridden menu. I wrote her back that I had fed Ben chicken fried steak the night before and gave her my menu. It got to the point that once we were talking on the phone and mentioned that we might make chicken fried steak that night and both men started drooling and actually wanted the meal. We laughed.

Next, I started telling my other friends, Shirley, Dian and Charlotte about 'chicken fried steak' and each added items to the menu. It kept growing. Charlotte even told her lifelong friend in Germany about it...so our custom has gone international. I think this should be a national woman's movement. Hmmmm.....planning a menu as I type....