Chicken Pot Pie

“ugh. Dammit! I can’t even look at this anymore. Here. You deal with it.”

With that, David shoved the pie crust he had been attempting to manipulate into the casserole dish towards me and turned his attention back to the stove.

David and I sometimes like to play chef and sous chef. He’ll have me stir a pot, salt some meat, or ladle broth into a roux.

When I’m in the kitchen, I usually kick him out. Apparently his sous-chef alter ego is obsessed with things I usually try to avoid, like “recipes” and “measurements”.

Chef sous chef role play requires beer, preferably in growler form. Pictured: dry hopped Rye 75

Despite that, I think it is my flexibility and his adherence to procedure that makes us into a good pseudo-chef-sous-chef team. Taking the casserole dish from him, I worked the pastry into it, ignoring David still muttering about the dough, cursing as if it has personally slighted him by refusing to obey. While I did this, he measured out the ingredients for creating a truly tasty chicken pot pie.

We’ve made several pot pies, one with dark and white meat and another with roast turkey, which we had leftover from the night before. With pot pie, your best choices are to either cook chicken breasts just for the pie, or to use leftover poultry from dinner the night before.

A note on pastry crust—while we attempted to be industrious on the last pot pie and make our own, if you are in a hurry, or don’t want to fuss with pastry dough, just buy the Pillsbury ready made sheets.

After you’ve put your pie crust in whatever casserole dish or pie pan you are using, place the cooked chicken in. For vegetables, we usually go with diced carrots and peas. We make a roux as a tasty binder, (corn starch as a thickener -blech) and we can attest that after we have added the sherry to the sauce, the smells wafting off of it are some of the most delicious our kitchen has witnessed.

whenever something is extremely tasty, it's a safe bet butter is involved

Pot Pie Supreme, with Chicken Supreme, in a Cutlass Supreme*
*only Tenacious D fans will get this reference

For the sauce:
1/2 White onion, diced
2 cloves Garlic, pressed
2 tbsp Dry Orlosso Sherry
2 cups Chicken stock, low sodium
3/4 cup Milk
2 tsp. Dried herbes de provence

Salt and pepper to taste.

Add the peas and carrots to the sauce.

Roux:

5 tbsp Butter, Salted
1/3 cup Flour

You can add the sherry and the onion to the roux, or add them both to the sauce. We added both to the roux this time. Add and whisk sauce into to the roux until the mixture starts to flow, then add the thickened mixture back to the sauce.

Other:

10 oz Frozen peas and carrots
3 cups Precooked poultry
2 9" Round pastry dough

Place the assembled pie in the oven at 425 for 35 minutes. Once done, take out and let cool for at least 5 minutes.

When you slice the pot pie, it’s not going to be neat. It’s going to be messy—and delicious.

Honestly, by the time the pot pie is ready, and especially if you have made the sauce above, you will have been smelling it cooking and getting hungrier and hungrier at that point; it will be difficult to not tear into the pot pie like a ravenous bear. Just do the best you can.

Garnish with smoked paprika.