A little bit 'o chicken

Planned on eating leftover pizza tonight (had parents over last night and made pizza again), but it happened to be gone – Jaime ate it for lunch. This left me with a single thawed chicken breast in the fridge and a couple pounds of frozen solid hamburger meat.

Not a whole lot of options – but I had been thinking about a pair of personal chicken pot pies on my way home. Jaime had some leftover puff pastry from her party (from an attempt at brie en croute) and so I thought that might work. Got home about 7 PM, and saw that the puff pastry took at least 40 minutes to thaw. So much for that, but I decided to go ahead and make some fresh pie dough and just use that.

Whipped that up and put it in the freezer to set up.

Got the filling going – recipe out of my ATK book called for 3 lbs of chicken, but with only 12 oz (1 breast), I went ahead with the same proportions of liquid (figured I could just use what I needed).

Cooked it up – even used some of the Grappa that Keith brought me from Italy – but realized I had no chicken stock. I used water instead, and created a truly insipid tasting cream sauce. It tasted something like Grappa mixed with warm milk and garlic. Ugh. I added some salt and pepper, and it just made for a salty insipid cream sauce with a little heat. I started to get a bit concerned, and then remembered I kept bouillon cubes around for just such an eventuality – one of these little magical treasures turned the sauce around – if not a bit salty.

All in all, these pot pies (without the veggies, of course, since i had none in the house and I had not stopped at the store) were pretty good. And I made the extra pie crust into cinnamon fingers.