There’s something incredibly satisfying to grow and evolve into my kitchen just a little more, a personal accomplishment. And speaking of accomplishments, today’s recipe is my own, an ode to my past and to my favorite comfort food—especially since I have been suffering a nasty cough for over a week and needed something simply joyful in my belly—and it’s one I’ve been perfecting and altering for over 10 years. Chicken Pot Pie. Yes, iconic and not the most complicated concept, but by no means short on flavor and variations due to its incredibly versatility. The story behind it for me starts in high school, Island School, which also happened to be part of the English (British) School Foundation, where I was lucky enough to be part of the Food Technology department during my freshman and sophomore year, and spent two full years working on year long projects surrounding food chemistry, techniques, and approaches. Mind you, it was not intensive like it might be at culinary school, where you also learn about flavor profiles and how to correctly cut an onion or filet a fish. No, this was culinary school at its most elementary level with a tight budget to boot.

While I can’t remember for the life of me what my project was my freshman year (probably something not very tasty otherwise I would remember it), the project I worked on my sophomore year was a healthy, after school snack. Now, you may not think a pot pie would be any school goers go-to snack once that back pack hit the floor, but we had made little empanada style pocket fillers the week before when we were learning about dough, the correct ratio of foundation ingredients, and what happens when you alter whole wheat and white flour content (because we were trying to be healthy about it), and I couldn’t help it. In my mind, it was so obvious to make mini pot pies that you could pop in the microwave and eat six minutes later (very much like what Marie Callender was already doing in the frozen food market). So I defended it, all year, working my butt off on trying crust variation after crust variation, feeding them to my friends at lunch to find out which ratio was the tastiest, ensuring it still upheld the healthy requirements. I altered the gravy—would there be milk, would there not be milk, and if there was milk what kind—I altered the meat—for the record, pork and beef did not make good pot pies, at least from my experience, but if anyone has a good recipe for me to try, please share and prove me wrong!—and I altered the spices I included to complicate the flavor profile of the gravy. If it could be adjusted, I adjusted it, and I tested combinations of alterations every week until I had something that was pretty darn near perfect (and obviously got the A it deserved).

But that was it for a while. The last two years of high school were spent fulfilling my basic requirements for an American university, and then I didn’t have the opportunity to really cook or experiment in college, so it wasn’t until six years ago when I moved to Chicago and started to live on my own that I started to cook again. But you better believe one of the first things I made was Chicken Pot Pie. But something was wrong. It wasn’t that I had switched crusts (from handmade to Pillsbury boxed dough, mostly because I was a lazy grad student who needed every minute she had to read and write and plan lessons), but rather it just didn’t have the same taste as I remembered it. It was boring, it was plain. So I started to mess around with it, changing something every time I made it. One time I tried to add turmeric (which I had used a lot in high school because the spice was very good for you, despite the fact it turned EVERYTHING yellow), then another time I tried adding cream instead of milk, I tried biscuits instead of crust, and eventually it started to get better and better and better, not like how I remember it, but rather how my own evolution into adulthood required the recipe to do the same.

And so, without further delay, I present The Real Cooking Maggie’s Chicken Pot Pie (this recipe may be subject to further change as I continue to cook it, but for right now, this is the real deal)! If you try this recipe and altered it in anyway, let me know! I’d love to hear how other folks are putting their own spin to this classic!

Oh, and before I forget, I will be adding a note at a later time regarding my revival of the crust experiment using my late grandmother’s pastry crust recipe as a starting off point (since my own original recipe got lost somewhere in one of the various moves my family made around Hong Kong before officially relocating back to the States). I will not include that recipe here as I have not had time with it on my own, which I need to do for myself as much as for my quest for further culinary growth, and no doubt that will be a fairly emotional moment when I get to it since my grandmother was always in the kitchen cooking. So naturally, some time needs to be taken so it can be done right, but be sure to keep an eye out for it!

---

Cooking Maggie’s Chicken Pot Pie

So this is a pot pie recipe that I developed over ten years ago when I was first learning about food science in High School. Yeah, you read that right, 10 YEARS! That being said, this recipe, it’s not perfect, and will likely never be, but that’s what makes cooking and the process of developing a recipe so exciting! And boy has this recipe gone through the ringer! As it gets updated, I will add those extra notes below.

Update 11.14.2019: I have also made this recipe in a very LARGE casserole dish and used Pillsbury Biscuit Dough SHEETS and kind of did a mish mosh of getting 3 cans of the stuff to work as bottom and top layer for a much larger crowd. The results were a complete success and ZERO, I repeat, ZERO leftovers!

Update 9.15.2018: I have adjusted the recipe to now be a ONE POT recipe! WOAH! I used a technique that one of my friends taught me regarding her family’s recipe for gravy and it worked out really well.

Ingredients

• 1 Box Pillsbury Pie Crust or Homemade Crust (future recipe to follow)
• 2 chicken breasts, cut into bite sized pieces
• ¼ cup white wine (drinking quality wine)
• 1/3 chopped onion or 2 shallots, minced
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• ½-1 cup diced red potatoes (roughly 2 small red potatoes, not peeled, cubed)
• 1/3 cup butter
• 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
• ½ cup milk
• 1 ¾ cup Chicken Broth/Stock
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 1 tsp dried parsley (or 2 tablespoon fresh parsley, finely chopped)
• ½ tsp crushed red pepper
• ¼ tsp kosher sea salt
• ¼ tsp ground black pepper
• 1-2 cups of frozen peas, carrots, corn, and/or green beans (combined preferable)

Instructions

1. Heat oven to 425°F. If using boxed pie dough, unroll one of the doughs and place in a 9-inch glass pie pan.
2. Heat a little oil in a deep saute pan, and cook chicken until half cooked. Add ¼ cup white wine to deglaze the pan, scraping up all those good crusty bits. Add onions (or shallots), garlic, and potatoes, stirring often for about 5-6 minutes to prevent sticking for about 5 minutes. You can add some more white wine (or a little bit of oil) if you need a little more moisture in the pan.
3. Then, add in the butter, melting it, then add in flour and stir until everything is completely coated. Gradually stir in the milk, then the broth a little at a time until smooth and at the consistency that you want.
4. Lastly, add the spices, and let simmer, stirring occasionally so potatoes don’t stick to the sides of the pot, and cook until potatoes are ¾ done (tasting as you go or checking with a fork, but I prefer to taste), and then stir in frozen vegetables.
5. Spoon chicken mixture into crust-lined pan. Top with second crust, seal edges, and cut slits in several places in top crust.
6. Bake 20 minutes till lightly golden brown on the top.
7. Let sit and cool for 5-7 minutes before cutting into, then ENJOY!

Notes

• Seasoning can be adjusted to taste (and I like my gravy to be a little on the herbaceous side to enhance all the other wonderful ingredients in this dish), but these are the amounts I would start with.
• You should only be cooking with white wine (or any wine/liquor) that you would drink too. Not only does that make the actual meal taste better, but the wine you use could make a great wine pairing.
• I know some people like to put foil over the edges of their pie, but since the inside is basically already done cooking, this makes cooking the crust simple enough that burning should never be an issue.