Chicken Pot Pie by Emily!

Tonight I featured a chicken pot pie, courtesy of my own recipe. I took like 5 different chicken pot pie recipes, and made my own. Here’s what I did to make enough CPP to feed a very hungry Jacob and me:

• Sauteed slightly flattened chicken breast in butter on medium, with S, P, garlic powder, and onion powder until done. To keep it juicy, I poured a couple of spoonfuls of chicken stock on the skillet and covered it.
• Warmed maybe half a box of chicken stock in a saucepan with 1 chicken bouillon cube.
• Sauteed little more than half of a big garlic glove, carrot circles, celery pieces, onion chunks in butter for 10 ish minutes. I probably had half of a cup of celery, a little more carrot, and a little more onion.
• Deglazed with a little less than half a baby bottle of white wine. (which had been frozen!)
• After wine cooked down, I added maybe a little less than 1/2 cup flour and stirred for 2 minutes. There were some brown flour bits on the pan.
• I poured in the chicken stock and reduced the heat some. Once it thickened a little, I added maybe 1/8 cup of heavy cream.
• Stirred for a little, added S&P, a little dried thyme, and peas.
• Poured the mixture into my circle white dish, but it didn’t really reach the top. I put the puff pastry sheet on anyway, brushed it with egg wash and S&P, cut a few ugly slits. I was trying to make an E and a J, but it didn’t work. =P
• Since the puff pastry fell to the top of the filling, the middle didn’t brown as well as the edges. I tried to be innovative and stick a knife under the pastry through the holes I made to raise the pastry up. It worked, but messed up the knife some. Whoops. =P
• So after maybe 40 minutes of baking, we dug in! And it was freakin’ good!

Chicken stuffed with P,G,S and spinach artichoke dip

I made chicken breast rolled around prosciutto, shredded gruyere, and spinach. I saw the recipe on the “We are not Martha” blog, which has some good pictures. The author got the recipe from Cooking Light, which I referred to so I knew the exact cooking times. We made 4 chicken breasts and half of the sauce. I stuffed the chicken and rolled it up in plastic wrap overnight with toothpicks. We only sauteed the chicken and skipped the oven step. The biggest breast was a tiny bit raw in the middle. Next time – saute a little less and cook in the oven for 5 minutes, or cover the skillet a lot more. After removing the chicken from the pan, I made the sauce. After adding the chicken stock, it cooked and thickened a lot faster than I was expecting. We didn’t even use the cornstarch slurry. I would want to take it off of the heat a tiny bit earlier so it will be a little more liquid-y next time. But this chicken was AWESOME! Very cute too. 🙂 It was pretty moist, especially in the middle, and it has a ton of flavor. I cooked the rest of the gnocchi from my first ever homemade batch, and threw it into the skillet and rolled them around some.

On the side, a new spinach artichoke dip from RZ, called Artichoke Spinach Dip from Olive Garden. Used 8 oz cream cheese, half box of frozen spinach, half can artichokes, little extra parmesan on top. Popped it under the broiler and ate! Way less cooking and fewer ingredients than my original SA dip, and totally delicious. We’ll be comparing to the other recipe Wednesday night!

My first chinese food, Bourbon chicken!

I made Bourbon chicken from RZ, which is their #1 most popular recipe right now. I used about 4 b/s chicken thighs, but made all of the sauce. I left out the red pepper flakes completely and it was delicious. We used some cornstarch to thicken the sauce, no clue how much though. I steamed some broccoli and carrots and threw them into the skillet too. This will probably be one of the only chinese recipes I make for a while though. It was really simple, but needed some new ingredients like soy sauce and apple cider vinegar. I’ll probably take those home for thanksgiving or christmas so my mom can make this without buying lots of ingredients. I’m so nice, haha.