Chicken Pot Pie - Sandra Lee Style

I love Sandra Lee-style meals (semi-homemade).  This chicken pot pie recipe can go MANY ways.  You can use canned or frozen or even fresh veggies (if you cook them a little first), you can use different combos of soup mixes, and you can use different types of chicken.  I have used leftover chicken from other dishes, rotisserie chicken, and even boiled breasts and cut them up for this.  I have done so many different ways but it always turns out great.  One of my favorite things though, is the refrigerated crust.  In my opinion, for this dish, it is not worth your time to make the dough from scratch.  Tastes the same and takes forever, plus rolling it out is a chore.  I am a huge fan of doing things homemade, so go for it if that's your thing, but using premade crust and soup mix makes this meal that you can prep in 10 minutes, tops.  This is one of Glenn's favorite and most requested meals.  

What you need:
- 2 refrigerated pie crusts (they usually come in a 2 pack)
- 3 to 4 cups of cooked and cut up chicken
- 2 cans of veg-all, drained (or 3 cups of frozen veggies) 
- 2 cans of cream of chicken soup (or one cream of chicken and one cream of celery)
- 1/2 cup of milk
- dash of Worcestershire
- black pepper to taste
- egg white 

What you do:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. In a large bowl, add soup, milk, black pepper, and Worcestershire and mix up.  Add veggies and chicken and stir up.  Lay the first crust out over the pie pan and add the chicken mixture. Unroll the second pie crust and place gently on top.  Cut a few slits in the top for steam to escape and then use a fork to close the edges.  If you are dorky like me, you can take the extra crust from the top and make a seasonal theme for your pot pie ( I intended to post this a few weeks ago for Halloween, but baby brain hit me hard).  Brush the top of the pie with egg whites and bake for 45 minutes to an hour.  Some people like to cover the edges of the crust with tin foil so it doesn't get burned, but I have found with cooking it at a lower temperature you don't need to do this step.  Probably depends on the oven too. 

Enjoy!
-hayden

Chicken Saltados

Making a pantry meal is a fine art.  My mother taught me the basics of a pantry meal and they have since been an important key to our dinner menu.  First things first: what is a pantry meal? It’s simple; a pantry meal is a meal that can be constructed on the fly with what you have in the ‘pantry’.  I am a fan of a pantry meal, and although I usually don’t measure what is going into the meals, I will try and remember now so I can share the most excellent ones with you.  This is a most excellent pantry meal that came together quite nicely and I will definitely make again. 

Last weekend on the way home from my mom’s house, we ate at Taco Mac - my favorite- and brought home leftovers consisting of 4 wings, 2 chicken fingers, and some fries (and sadly no cheese dip).  That is definitely not enough for a whole meal for two, so Glenn came up with the Saltados idea and we ran with it.  Keep in mind that this is a pantry meal so feel free to add/subtract/substitute for whatever you want. Here’s what we did:

What you need:

1 cup cooked chicken cut into pieces (we used wing and tender meat)

¼ onion sliced

¼ bell pepper sliced (can be any color)

4 mushrooms sliced (we used baby bellas)

handful of fries  (yes, a handful is a true measurement)

1 cup cooked brown rice

4 small or medium tortillas

fajita seasoning (recipe below)

Optional but highly recommended

avocado sliced into small pieces

2 lime wedges

cilantro

For fajita seasoning: 

½ teaspoon ground cumin

1/8 teaspoon dried oregano (crushed)

1/8 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon ground red pepper

1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper

dash garlic powder (or more if you are like me and LOVE garlic)

dash onion powder

How you do it:

Once you’ve got everything sliced up, this dish is pretty simple.  I started the rice while I was slicing and dicing, so it was done by the time the rest of the fillings were ready to be put into the tortillas.  At the same time I started the rice, I put the tortillas in foil and heated them in a 350° oven to warm.  You could also put them in the microwave prior to serving, or just serve em cool.  With some cooking oil, sauté up the onion, pepper, and mushrooms (you’ll want them to be pretty crunchy still) and then add the chicken and fries. In the end, toss the fajita seasoning over the top with a little water, enough to make the seasoning stick, but not too much – you don’t want it watery.  Now, wasn’t that simple. Now you just put everything together.  First- the tortilla, then the rice, then the chicken and veggie mixture - you could stop here, but I wouldn’t recommend it… keep on going, add the cilantro (we didn’t have any fresh cilantro but used the cilantro in a tube which I highly recommend) and the avocado and squeeze the lime over the top. And you’re done, time to enjoy! 

-hayden