I hate it when The Man moves holidays around just to make a three day weekend, but at the station today, we observed Texas Chicken Fried Steak Day, a day before the official holiday designated by the state legislature two years ago.

Keep in mind: Texas Chicken Fried Steak Day is separate from National Chicken Fried Steak Day, which is held annually on January 6. Texas rightfully refuses to acknowledge some Beltway insider trying to tell us when to celebrate cream gravy.

But not everyone loves cream gravy on their chicken fried steak. My colleague, Matt, interviewed Ed Murph, the owner of Norma’s Cafe, this afternoon on KLIF. He reports that real estate magnate Ebby Halliday likes brown gravy with her chicken fried steak.

This led to a roundtable discussion with Matt, myself and Mark Watkins, who came across the hall from WBAP. Mark’s position is that there is one way to prepare chicken fried steak: there’s a steak, there’s cream gravy and there’s mashed potatoes.

He was further offended to learn that the mayor of Frisco, Maher Maso, prefers a grilled cheese sandwich with a chicken fried steak stuffed inside along with a fried egg, bacon and cream gravy. He went on to declare that the sandwich should be followed by a hollowed-out cinnamon roll with a scoop of ice cream inside:

Murph told us Maso quickly ate the entire meal. Frisco must have great cardiologists.

I’m with Mark to a degree: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But I am a little more open-minded. If the winds of change are blowing toward introducing cheese to chicken fried steak, I’m willing to give it a shot. Instead, I might slap some mashed potatoes on the sandwich and pour the gravy on top and fry the whole thing, creating a sort of monte cristo situation.

Before Matt got on the phone with Murph, I told him the chicken fried steak dates to the German immigrants who started arriving in Texas in the 1800s. They couldn’t find the ingredients for wiener schniztel, so they started making the closest thing they could.

Murph says the CFS was born on the Chisholm Trail, which is a much more Texas-y explanation. When confronted with our data, he said, “Whatever you want to view it, it’s a great thing (You can listen to the entire discussion here).”

Maybe that’s what Texas Chicken Fried Steak is really all about: freedom. Freedom to fix your chicken fried steak however you like because you’re an American, damn it! And for 237 years, Americans have been saying, “This would be better with cheese.”