Is it still summer? Roast chicken with gravy

I'm feeling a certain pre-Labor day eagerness for fall. I find myself looking forward to a return to cool mornings when I will dig out my favorite sweaters, and warm socks, too, and then a few weeks later, maybe even mittens. It's still 90 degrees in Kansas. Kind of hard to imagine cool days will ever come again.

Given this mood, we cooked a winter kind of dinner tonight. Actually, I got everything ready during my lunch hour, and while I was still working, Dave put dinner into the oven to roast for 90 minutes. Yes, it's still too hot to be roasting anything, but man, by the time I got home, dinner was delicious.

Here's what I did at lunchtime: I put a whole farmers' market chicken into a foil-lined baking dish, dabbed it with olive oil, and rubbed the skin with a crushed garlic clove and dried rosemary leaves. Then I covered the chicken with foil and put it into the fridge. Late in the day, Dave put this into the oven, uncovered, to roast at 375 degrees for about 90 minutes.

When I got home, I cooked some rice and steamed some broccoli, and made gravy from the chicken drippings. Yeah, summer's not over yet. But I can feel autumn coming on.

Homemade chicken gravy

Pour drippings from a medium-sized roast chicken into a deep skillet. In a Pyrex 2-cup measuring cup, combine 1 cup milk, 3 tablespoons flour and 1/4 cup white wine. Whisk 'til smooth. Heat drippings 'til boiling, then slowly add milk-flour mixture to drippings in skillet. Stir quickly with a wire whisk 'til thickened. Pour into a gravy boat. Serve over rice or potatoes.