dragonlady7

recipe post

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You didn’t think I’d forget this CLASSIC!! This has explanations of the Shepherd’s Pie and Cottage Pie variations as well. You could probably do it with some kinda meat substitute or without meat at all but I’m no expert on that.

This is actually the first dish I ever learned to make sans recipe. Everything else, I had a recipe and then got used to making it and stopped looking it up. This, I never could find a recipe that was exactly what I wanted. So this one is more free and loose than most.

I start this with leftover chicken, as from my Chicken Four Ways post. Oh christ let me try to find that. Tumblr search shakes fist

Ha I found another post where I complain about not being able to find that post, and this one is about a Chicken Sequence and has real recipes in it, but none of them are for chicken pot pie. So I should reblog that and link to this one, actually. But in the meantime here’s the explanation of a Chicken Sequence https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/648803519340691456/chicken-sequence .

ANYHOW chicken pot pie.

So you could do this with real pie crust but real pie crust is hard. I just make drop biscuits, and drop them on top. You can use any recipe for drop biscuits, just literally hit Google and pick at random as they all seem to be roughly the same; I usually use the dumpling recipe my mother gave me and vary the flour/milk proportions until it’s a good consistency for spreading. You can even roll out proper biscuits and arrange them over the top and prick them with a fork so they’ll fluff nicely, if you want to be fancy. I never care to be fancy, but you might as well if you’re going to all this trouble. Certainly feel free to practice your pie crust skills and do this super fancy.

VARIATION: you make mashed potatoes and put THEM on the top. Dot them with butter so they’ll brown a little. Usually I do this for the Shepherd’s/Cottage pie variation of this, which is the same dang dish but with all slightly different ingredients.

Anyway here’s how it goes.

Start with cooked shredded chicken. Leftovers are ideal, but you can make this more difficult if like by starting with raw chicken you have to cook. Any kind you like, just if it’s on bones take it off them, and make it be little pieces, either shreds or cubes or whatever. Add them in later, but you want to start off with it cooked, so I put this here first.

(For the shepherd’s or cottage pie variant, you want to start with raw ground beef or mutton, and brown it first, and then do all the rest of the steps in the pan drippings.)

You want vegetables in this– aromatics and fillers, just a bit of the latter.

And you’ll want a bit of stock in this, so either finish rendering your chicken carcass and make stock, or use stock you already have, or use water and just add a lot more flavorings.

Now, I make this in a cast iron dutch oven so I can start off by sauteeing my aromatics in– well, I also tend to cook in bacon fat or lard, because I work on a pig farm and lard is basically free. But do what’s right.

For aromatics– onion, carrot, fennel bulb if you got it, diced fine. Cook them in the lard until they soften up a bit, maybe start with the onion so it can brown a little, I’m a sucker for onions with a little color on them. Garlic late in the process if you want to use any. I usually put a little salt in at this point.

Then you can make a roux if you want– put some flour in, stir it to get it well-mixed, and then put in your stock or water, stir it really well, scrape the pot to make sure none of the flour stuck, and then you can dump in your filler vegetables, and then top off the whole thing with liquid to the correct depth (explained below). Sans roux it still works fine, just be sparing with the liquid but probably the starchier vegetables will soak it up.

(If you don’t have a dutch oven, now is when you transfer it out of your skillet or saucepan and dump it into a casserole and make your arrangements as necessary.)

Usually I use a little potato, and then some diced-up something– winter squash, rutabaga, turnip, storage radishes (like daikon), etc. You could use summer squash, in season. You could also go a more summer-vegetable kind of route with seasonal availability– broccoli or cauliflower would be good. You could put kale in this if that’s your jam. Really anything goes. Frozen mixed veg, if that’s what you got. For shepherd’s pie I often do like, frozen peas and canned sweet corn and the like. Just make sure there’s some salt in this. (There might already be a lot, especially if you’ve used store-bought stock, which is valid, but also tends to have adequate salt unlike homemade stock which it doesn’t matter how much salt you put in it is never quite salty enough.) I also like to put herbs in. I use a lot of dried thyme. YMMV, you probably have seasonings you like, use those. (For beef i often use sage. For mutton, rosemary.)

Put them all in, and put in your cooked meat. You want to kind of eyeball this so that the level of the liquid is like, juuuuust under the level of the chunks, so that your pie crust or biscuits or potatoes can rest just above the level of the liquid, but if there’s more liquid than that whatever it’s fine the biscuits will still cook.

Anyway– now you put your Starch Topping on, whether that be drop or rolled biscuits, dumplings, or mashed potatoes.

Then you stick the thing in a preheated oven of like 375 or so, and bake it like 45 minutes or so, until it’s bubbling and your topping is cooked and browned a bit on top.

Voila! Serve hot! Now your house smells like love! Makes awesome leftovers. (Your picture was not posted)