Leftover whole chicken was a major player in my house as a single mom.  Thanks gramma!  One of the more uppity dishes I would make was chicken pot pie.  Yes, uppity.  You know you’re a poor broke lady when you consider chicken pot pie to be uppity.  But it was definitely a treat for us.

The versatility of chicken pot pie is really key, too.  You can use a homemade pie crust or a store bought one.  You can get real uppity and use puff pastry dough.  I’d use the puff pastry when I wanted to feel less poor.  Even if it was for just the duration of the meal.   And you can change up your vegetables…parsnips instead of carrots.  Green beans instead of peas.  Leeks instead of onions.  It goes on and on.  You could even add chopped leafy greens!

Feeling poor all the time is draining.  You’re reminded of it a million times a day all day long everyday.  At the end of the day at the grocery store counting pennies, I’d allow myself a box of puff pastry.  The kid preferred puff pastry, too.  He liked feeling fancy.  It’s amazing, isn’t it?  How just a little thing like puff pastry can make things feel special?  And it’s better for you than a bag of Doritos, which costs about the same.  Pro single mom tip:  I only used one crust so I got two “pies” from one box.  So technically, it was more like a chicken pot pie~ish stew.  I still do it this way. Aaahhh….the little things.

Anywho…where was I?  Oh yes, the leftover chicken.  Just separate out all the skin, cartilage, bones and whatnot and make a pile of bite sized chicken.  I used to have to slap my kid’s hand out of the bowl.  He’s notorious for the walk by swiping.  Really, it’s the vegetable chopping that would take the most time, so I reserved this particular meal for the one day off I had a week.  Well….when I had one day off a week.  Otherwise, I’d prep the veggies on one night, and make the pot pie the next.  You gotta sleep some time!

But on those days off, I would take my time making this because cooking for me was very zen.  Well, it still is….it’s just….different.  Now I get to experiment like a crazed maniac.  I had to purposefully go back to that state of mind when I was a single mom, taking my time to make a pot pie, and relaxing.  I put on my pajamas and I even poured myself a glass of cheap white wine.  Ok, it was the rose we made, but I added two ice cubes.  Ha!

It was fun to relive that part of my life while making this.  Because it was such a long period of time in my life.  Sometimes, I miss the solitude of it.  There’s something satisfying in being self reliant, even if it is hard.  And even if  you aren’t so great at it sometimes.  I really love all you single parents out there.  You are the stuff great things are made from.  Don’t listen to all the naysayers because lawd knows there are lots of them.  Just give ’em the finger and make a pot pie.  That’s what I did.

I made this particular pot pie for this post with the traditional vegetables because they are the most readily available and the most economical.  This entire dish would cost me about ten dollars, but I’m halving the cost of the chicken and the puff pastry because I could use both for two dinners.  The standard veggies collectively cost about two bucks and then a couple of bucks for dairy.  Ten bucks for this dish is actually being pretty generous.

Chicken Pot Pie

3 cups cooked chicken chopped
1 quart chicken broth
1 cup whole milk
1 stick butter
1 scant half cup flour
3 cups carrots cut into thick coins
1 onion chopped
1 tablespoon fresh rosemary chopped
1 cup frozen green beans
1 cup frozen peas
1/2 cup frozen sweet corn
1/2 cup white wine or additional chicken broth
1 sheet frozen puff pastry
2 teaspoons black pepper
Kosher salt to taste (I used my herbed pink salt)

Set one sheet of frozen puff pastry aside to defrost.  In a deep saute pan, cook the butter, carrots, onion, rosemary, salt and pepper on medium high heat.

When the butter starts to bubble, add the flour and stir vigorously.  When the flour becomes difficult to scrape up with a wooden spoon, deglaze with the wine.  If you aren’t using wine, use the additional chicken broth and continue to cook for about 5 minutes.

Add the quart of chicken broth and the milk.  Stir the mixture until it’s smooth and then let it reduce by about half for about 20 minutes, stirring every few minutes to avoid sticking on the bottom.   Then lower the heat to a simmer to get the sauce to thicken for about 10 minutes.

Stir in the chicken, green beans, peas, and corn.  Spoon the mixture into a casserole dish.  Cover with puff pastry.  Bake in the oven on 350 for about 35 minutes or until the puff pastry is browned.  Serve in bowls!

We are a family of dark meat eaters when it comes to chicken.  The downside to cooking a whole chicken is that I had to eat the white meat so that the kid could eat all the dark meat.  Annoying.  But hey, parenting ain’t a daily trip to the spa.  With a pack of chicken legs, though, I’d get to have all the dark meat I could possibly devour in one sitting.  Go me!

Dry seasoning blends were my saviour.  I love them so much, in fact, that I started making my own.  But in the meantime, use whatever flavors you like!  If I was serving rice and a hot vegetable, I’d go with lemon pepper.  If I was opening a can of baked beans and boiling (or grilling) up some corn on the cob, I’d go with a bbq rub.  If all I had time for was a quick chopped salad with Italian dressing, I’d use garlic salt on the chicken.  It’s super easy, the possibilities are endless, and the chicken is cheap.

All you have to do is place the chicken on a baking sheet covered in parchment, season all the legs, and bake them.  Dinner is done in half an hour, even if you make rice and or a hot vegetable.  The skin is crispy.  The salad or whatever else you made gets devoured and everyone is happy.  The best part is, you aren’t exhausted.

I haven’t cooked this way in awhile.  In the winter, I have less to do on the farm and so I have more time to spend in the kitchen.  And even now, I have tools I didn’t have previously….like the sous vide wand.  But last night, we were coming off three days and nights with no power.  We had a freak snow storm that downed lines and trees.  We got several inches.  Our generator took a crap and luckily for us, our neighbor plugged our refrigerator into his generator.  Whew!

When the power finally came on last night, I threw some drumsticks into the oven and chopped a salad with what I had on hand.  Which wasn’t much!  I had half a head of iceberg, some celery, a sweet bell pepper, and some buttery olives.  I couldn’t have asked for anything more.  Ok, maybe a shallot. Ok, maybe I had some shallots and I just didn’t feel like getting my hand mandoline out.  There.  Now you know.  Last night I used the garlic salt and some fine ground pepper.

If you’re like me, you keep a small variety of olives on hand in the pantry.  My standards are the spanish queens from Costco and some pitted castelvetranos.  Sometimes I have some marinated artisan varieties and sometimes I have some kalamatas and some stuffed with various things.  The spanish queens are salty and easy.  But by far, the castelvetranos are my favorite.  They just have this lovely buttery flavor I can’t get enough of.  Sorry not sorry to go on this olive tangent, but if you like olives in your salad, I had to mention my love affair with castelvetranos.

I used to make this dish all the time.  Decades ago.  It used to be my fanciest creation.  As time marched on, new and less time consuming dishes took over and the jambalaya was forgotten.  It didn’t help that some of the ingredients were hard to find.  It’s not like grocery stores were brimming with andouille sausage twenty years ago.

Yanno, and then life happened.  Job changing, moving, marrying, divorcing, becoming a mom.  And moving, job changing, marrying, and moving.  It just so happens that we have this funky little meat and fish market kind of off the beaten path down here in this smallish rural logging town.  The store has turned over a few times, but it looks like the new owners are on track to success.  I happened to be in on a day where they had both andouille AND giant prawns.

It was a sign.  I got both and decided to revisit this dish.  It was time to pause in the era of jambalaya before there was an Emeril.  Bam!  The last time I made this, I didn’t have a care in the world and basically no responsibilities.  I was also not that great in the kitchen.  Ha!  Looking back, I’d probably call that mess I made a pretend jambalaya.  Can you say Lawry’s seasoned salt?  Ugh.

One of my pet peeves about this dish is the overcooked shrimp.  It never fails.  Even upon perusing The Googles, you see the shrimp added too soon, too much, too chopped up, which accelerates the overcooking of the shrimp.  There are smarter ways to get the shrimp flavor distributed throughout the dish without ruining the shellfish in the process.  And chopped shrimp?  Why?!  Don’t bother.

Also, I chose to elevate it.  The garlic was black.  The water was replaced with shrimp broth.  And the herbs were fresh.  I recently recreated a chile chocolate pie that used ground dried chiles, so instead of just using powdered cayenne, I chose to grind dried chile instead.  It wasn’t super obvious, but I felt like there was more chile flavor instead of just flavorless heat.  It made a difference to me.

Hubs couldn’t stop eating it.  He thought it was divine.  As for me, I felt apathetic.  I think that, for the amount of work that goes into jambalaya, I’d be more impressed.  Perhaps this is why I don’t make it anymore.  And perhaps this is why so many recipes abuse the shrimp in jambalaya.  Because to me it’s pretty ho hum.  So Hubs got the rest of the pot to himself.  Perfect!