Chicken Pot Pie

Mmmmmm.....

Chicken Pot Pie!

Wow! Dick and I just made what may be my most favorite recipe that we've made yet!

While we were in New York in October we had some fantastic little chicken pot pies at the Boat House in Central Park. I think this was the first time that I realized that it was a dish that we both enjoyed so much, and something that we should try to make someday.

We've been doing a lot of cooking since then, especially out of the cookbook Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home. I had bought this cookbook for Dick years ago (he's a big Jacques Pepin Fan) and we've used it for a couple of recipes, but never really paid much attention to it. We watched the movie Julie and Julia a few months back, and were completely inspired. As this is the only Julia Child cookbook that we currently have (we'll be fixing that soon) we decided to dive into it, and have been trying out several recipes. We've also been recording and watching the Julia & Jacques Cooking At Home series on PBS which are on the air again.

Anyhow, we finally tried the Poached Chicken in aromatic vegetables recipe last night. It's fantastic - it's a whole chicken, leeks, celery, carrots, baby onion several different herbs, and white wine. Very simple, very yummy.

As much as we enjoyed this recipe, one of our favorite parts that are mentioned both in the book as well as on the TV series is that you can use leftovers from this dish to make two other dishes: Chicken, rice and vegetable soup and Chicken Pot Pie!

After dinner last night, we portioned off the amount of chicken, vegetables and broth that we'd need for the Chicken Pot Pie that we planned to make tonight, and used the rest as soup for lunch. Really yummy.

This evening, I made the dough (I used to make pies with homemade pie crust, but it's been a long time) and boiled done broth to start a roux. The roux was pretty simple - butter, flour and a little bit of cream was added to the condensed broth.

The chicken pot pie was SO good! It turned out just as good (or better!) than we had hoped! Success!

...and pretty, too!

This recipe is a keeper for sure. I can't wait to make it for company! :)