Chicken Pot Pie

There is something fun about one-pot meals. You know, where the meat, veggie and starch are all in the same dish. The thing is, the name "one-pot meal" is generally a misnomer - if you consider everything that goes into getting all of those pieces into that one pot, you generally wind up with a full sink of dishes. This was definitely the case for tonight's one-pot meal of chicken pot pie.

While I know that there are many easier paths that can be taken to make chicken pot pie, I decided to go all out and go from scratch today, from using fresh veggies to making my own crust. So I guess that sink full of dishes is pretty much my own fault...

The first step was to make the pie crust, since it can rest in the fridge while the rest of the prep work was being done. While I made the crust, little miss got a head start on prepping the veggies by shucking some fresh corn for me. I usually make my pie crusts by hand, since I don't have a food processor, whisking the dry ingredients and cutting in the butter with knives. Today I decided to use my KitchenAid mixer, just to take one manual step out of the process. It worked out beautifully, and when the dough went into the fridge (and all of the corn silk was cleaned up), little miss and I took a break and played outside for a while.

The rest of the prep work largely consisted of chopping, between the chicken, onions, sweet potatoes (which I steamed a little to soften) and carrots (which I boiled first, also to soften them up). I fit all this chopping in between reading books and playing a variety of games.

When it was finally time to actually pull the dish together, though, it was nice to have all of the work (and half of the dishes) behind me. A little butter, a little flour, some chicken stock and some milk, in addition to the chopped chicken and veggies, and the filling was ready to go.

All that was left was to top the dish with the crust. Most chicken pot pie recipes call for the pies to be made in individual sized portions or, at the largest, in regular pie plates, and I think the top crust is the reason for that. I made my pie family style, in a 9" x 13" pan, and let me tell you - rolling and maneuvering a single pie crust to cover that is not necessarily fun or easy, but little miss and I managed, and soon the pie was in the oven.

Because of the larger size of my dish, I wasn't quite sure how long it would take to cook. Most pot pie recipes call for about 25 minutes. Mine took closer to 30 or 35 minutes, and the filling leaked out around the crust a bit, but by dinner time, it looked and smelled delicious, so we were excited to dig in.

In our family, we always serve pot pie with rice, and tonight, I also served a side of corn, since, despite little miss's fantastic prep work, we forgot to mix the cooked and cut corn into the filling. Tonight, those sides were perfect, since my sauce thinned out a lot during the pie's time in the oven. That aside, though, this came out really well - the flavor was exactly what we had in mind when we put this on the week's meal plan, the crust was delicious and flaky, and the meal was devoured by all three of us. It was definitely worth all of the dishes.