Chicken (Turkey) Pot Pie

One of my daughters-in-law called the other day asking for my recipe for Chicken Pie because my boy apparently had a craving. This is comfort food at its finest, but it's one of those recipes that doesn't really have an exact recipe. What recipe there is came from my mother, and her version begins with...."Catch a chicken. Pluck." Yeah, see what I mean? So I'm going to give you a kind-of recipe, and then I'm going to show you how it really happens at my house.

Chicken Pot Pie

For an 8 or 9-inch square pan:

• 1-1 1/2  cups cooked, cut up chicken or turkey
• About 1 cup of cooked rice
• About 1 cup cooked vegetables, and this can literally be a mixture of any assorted, cooked vegetables. It's a great fridge clean out dish.
• Some gravy to pour over everything
• 1-9" pie crust

Combine all ingredients except the pie crust in an 8 or 9" baking dish. Cover with the pie crust and bake at 375° for 45 minutes. You can make this in a 13x9 pan by just increasing the quantities in....and I can't believe I'm saying this....math-like proportions. 

So at my house it usually happens just a little differently,  usually starting either with a turkey dinner, or with chicken I've cooked in a crock pot. In either case, I take some leftover gravy from the turkey dinner or I thicken the broth from cooking the chicken in the crock pot, and either go ahead and make the chicken pie, or freeze the meat and gravy for use later on, like what you see in the above picture. This happens to be turkey and gravy left from Thanksgiving. As I'm cleaning up Thanksgiving dinner, I just put this together and it goes directly into the freezer.

Then I thaw the base on the day I want to make it...

I think I've mentioned before that I keep a container in the freezer with all the last little bits of vegetables that don't get eaten at various dinners. I use them in soups, or stir-fry, or something like this dish.

I combine them with the meat, gravy and a little leftover rice that was in the fridge from another meal....

....and put a pie crust over the top. The recipe for this particular pie crust is coming next week. I don't worry about rolling it into the precise shape of the pan. I just fold the edges back on themselves.  I also don't worry about venting the crust since there are plenty of gaps around the edges.

Then it bakes at 375° for 45 minutes. I put it on a cookie sheet because sometimes I get the pan too full and a little gravy boils over, like you see here. This size pan serves 5-6, depending on the people you're serving.

 

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[AP Man]

As Collin says, "March the 4th be with you."