I know I am always one to dip down into the slums on Tuesday. It's only Tuesday...you still have four days of a regular job to wade through...the gym sucked, you co-workers are needy and you have to cook tonight.
DON'T TRANNY-DIP. Let's start the day off with a bang.
WATCH THIS:
There! Don't you feel a little better.
Okay - yesterday I wrote about people and their childhood memories. I can always get depressed when I compare myself to my mother. I loved her but she was a major psychological mess.
But one thing we did do together well was make CHICKEN POT PIE!
Come with me...
A few years ago, she passed. She and I were always at odds with each other, but if there was one thing we had in common, it was our unfailing sense of humor and ability to see the irony in life.In the end, she gave into the darker side of her own private demons, but a few months before she passed away, she called me in New York (she lived in Boise, Idaho at the time, in a smallish trailer park - yea, honey, I'm white trash raised) and asked me if I remembered when she and I used to make her famous Chicken Pot Pie together.
I told her I did. I told her I remembered them as the best times we had together. I also told her how big our asses got after we ate it. She dismissed me on the phone and asked me, “Yea, yea, but didn’t it taste great?” and I replied, “It sure as hell did.”
My mother was a difficult woman but the days we spent in the kitchen making her famous Chicken Pot Pie are some of the best days I can remember. And since it's getting colder in the country it's time to reinvent this famous pie.
She was an intelligent and compassionate woman who was also a skilled homemaker and, in the last third of her life, a nursing student who worked in the field as an RN for several doctors in the Seattle area.
As I write this I can see her weathered and gentle hands as she would roll out the dough for the pie and stir the pot with the filling. Today, I still make her Chicken Pot Pie recipe but I’ve lightened it up. Let’s be honest. Chicken Pot Pie is never a light meal. But over the years I’ve experimented and learned to lighten it up.
The classic Chicken Pot Pie recipe is made with heavy cream and loads of butter so you have a thick, creamy sauce to nestle the tender chicken, taste onions and peas and carrots inside. Add to it a homemade buttery crust and you are in heaven! Yum!
But all that butter and cream makes you fat and clogs your arteries so how to make this a tasty treat and not kill yourself in the process?
The following is my mother’s recipe and my own recipes. Because I make it thinking of the best times we ever had, it always tastes homey and comforting without all the fat and calories.Here is the famous recipe for
MAMA BRYAN'S *LIGHTER* CHICKEN POT PIE!
Ingredients:
☺ 2 bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts (don’t fight me here…you shred the meat later but you need the bone and the skin so the meat is tender).
☺ Salt* and pepper to taste
☺ 4 medium carrots, sliced ¼ thin
☺ 1 large onion, chopped fine
☺ ½ teaspoon dried thyme leaves
☺ ¼ cup all-purpose flour
☺ 2 ½ cups 1% low-fat milk
☺ ½ package baby frozen peas, thawed (10 ounce box)
☺ ½ package of frozen corn, thawed (10 ounce box)
☺ 1 lemon, halved and juice squeezed
☺ 6 phyllo sheets or 1 sheet of Pillsbury Pie Crust
Let’s cook!
1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees (is your oven unpredictable? Then you must get an oven thermometer. These two are cheap and very reliable: Taylor Classic Oven Guide Thermometer @ Model # 5921 at $14.95 and Component Design Magnet Mounted Thermometer Model MTOI @ $6.99 – both are available at Amazon.com…beware though – you cannot wipe the front of the Taylor thermometer after it’s dirty or you will wipe off the #’s.)
2. Put your chicken on a rimmed baking sheet (no need to oil) and salt and pepper them well. Roast them until a thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the breast (watch out for the bone!) reads 160 degrees**, which will take 25-30 minutes.
3. When the chicken is cool, take off the skin and gently shred the skin into bite-size pieces. If it’s too hot, you can always use two forks to pull apart the flesh (flesh…so gross). Set all that flesh aside. Ew, ew and ew.
4. About ten minutes into the chicken roasting, heat two tablespoons oil in a 10 inch saucepan, season with a dash of salt and pepper and cook on medium heat until carrots are crisp-tender, around 8 minutes (please don’t omit the salt at this point…adding a pinch of salt to onion helps to draw out moisture and resulting in the onions cooking evenly and not burning).
5. Add flour and cook, 1 minute, mixing constantly.
6. Gradually add milk (gradually add…do not rush this or you will ruin the dish) and cook – the mixture will go from a thick paste to a slightly thick cream sauce. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the mixture thickens, about 10 minutes or so.
7. Remove the mixture from the stove, stir in your peas, corn, lemon juice and chicken. Pour the filling gently into a 9-inch pie pan***.
8. Now you have one of two choices – if you want to go ‘healthy’ and less fat, use the phyllo dough. If you want to go traditional, then use pie crust on the top.
9. For the phyllo dough: this will sound confusing, but it’s really not. Phyllo comes in stacks of pieces. Phyllo dough is paper-thin sheets of raw, unleavened flour dough. Cut out an 11-inch circle from the stack; working with 2 pieces of phyllo at a time, gently brush them with oil and place phyllo over the pie (watching so you are 2 inches from the edge of the pie plate). When you have the stack over the pie press down gently until it fits inside of the rim. Bake 20-25 minutes and you are golden!
10. For the pie crush, simply unroll the Pillsbury dough, place gently over the pie and gently crimp along the sides. Cut two four inch slits in the top of the crush. In a small, separate bowl mix an egg yolk and 2 tablespoons of heavy cream. Gently brush this over the pie crust (making sure it doesn’t pool in the corners), and bake for 20-25 minutes until its bubbly.
Enjoy!
CHICKEN POT PIE WISDOM
*SALT: The skinny on salt is for most receipts Morton’s table salt is just fine. I tend to prefer the meatier taste of kosher salt but any salt will ultimately do. The TRICK is to always err on the side of LESS salt and taste as you cook.
** I learned a valuable lesson years ago from Chef Jacques Pepin when cooking meat. In America, we love to cook meat to the point where it almost dries up and flies away. The cooking of meat (especially chicken) is a true art. You always want to cook chicken to the point where it just turns white…and that point is right when it hits 160 degrees not 165 as most recipes books will tell you.
This means you need to get used to using a good, reliable instant-read thermometer or live with cutting the damn thing open and seeing if it’s still pink or not.
When you cook chicken to 160 degrees, take it out of the oven and let it sit on the counter. As it sits on the counter it continues to cook and will reach 165 degrees slowly and thus result in a moist, tender chicken breast. Nothing worse than dry chicken. *gag*.
*** Martha Stewart and Pyrex make great, cheap glass pie plates which are perfect for this. Around $8. Martha has a nice line of green ones at K-mart we like a lot. I have ten of them!
Kisses to you on a Tuesday! Remember...don't Tranny-Dip!
Celebrate your life and make Mama Bryan's Chicken Pot Pie tonight!
xo
Mikey Bryan Your Food Therapist
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