Chicken Pie

Making chicken pie can be really quick and easy as long as you've cooked the chicken before and have bought ready made pastry.

So two nights before making this chicken pie I cooked some chicken pieces in the oven for dinner and made double as much as we'd need so I'd have enough left over.

The next morning I took all the bits off the bones, made Andre a chicken mayo sandwich for work and put the rest back in the fridge to wait to be made into pie.

I buy ready made puff pastry. I always buy this with my groceries and then just leave it in the freezer. Remember to take it out and put it in the fridge the morning or night before you plan on making pie.

So here's a list of ingredient I used:
Chicken, cooked
green pepper, chopped
mushrooms, chopped
25 g butter + little extra for mushrooms
25 g flour
150 ml chicken stock
2-3 T cream
lemon juice
herbs, salt and pepper
pastry
1 egg, beaten

1. Blanch the green pepper in boiling salted water for 2-3 min.
Drain and rinse with cold water.

2. Sauté the mushrooms in butter for 2-3 min.

3. Melt 25g butter, then add 25 g flour and cook slowly until it becomes straw coloured.
Add 150ml chicken stock to the butter-flour mixture. Turn up the heat and stir until simmering.
Add 2-3T cream. Reduce heat and simmer until the mixture becomes sirupy.
Add a few drops of lemon juice, herbs, salt and pepper to taste.
Turn off the heat and add the chicken, peppers and mushrooms.

4. Add mixture to dish.

5. Roll out your pastry to about 1 cm thick. Cover dish with the pastry. Cut off any excess hanging over
the sides and use this to decorate your pie. I was in a romantic mood. See the picture below.
Cut air holes in the pastry to allow the steam to escape. Again see picture below. Brush some of the egg over the pastry to give it that golden colour.

6. Bake 25 - 35 minutes at 220C/ 425F/ Gas mark 7

Freshly bakes bread rolls

I decided to make chicken burgers for dinner and found this recipe for baking hamburger rolls. It promised to be light and fluffy. I don't know what I did wrong, because light and fluffy it definitely was not. But delicious it was. It's better suited for breakfast with jam on though.

The beautiful bread rolls!

I made a sauce to go with the chicken. A self made up and thrown together what's in the fridge recipe. I chopped and caramelized an onion, added chopped chili, tomato, green pepper and mushrooms. I added some red wine and a squeeze or two of barbeque sauce. Salt, pepper and herbs and let it bubble away on the stove. Keep the lid on for most of the time. If there's too much liquid, take the lid off to reduce it.

In the photo you can see the sauce in the bowl on the left and on the right is a zucchini salad.

Chicken Pot Pie

I've been wanting to make a chicken pie for a while now. Then I came across this recipe for a chicken pot pie on this website and thought I'll give it a try as I like trying out new recipes.

Prep time 25 min

Cook time 30 min

Difficulty easy

Ingredients

6 T butter

1/8 t thyme

1/4 t pepper

6 T flour

1 1/2 C chicken broth

1 1/2 C half-and-half (half cream)

2 C chicken breast, cubed

1 whole carrot, diced

1/2 C peas

6 whole new potatoes (I used one big potato), cubed

1 box Double crust pastry shell (Not sure exactly what this is, but I used puff pastry)

Cook chicken in some butter until brown. Remove from pan.

Boil vegetables until soft.

Cook butter, thyme, flour and pepper (add salt to taste) on low until bubbly.

Remove from heat and add chicken broth and cream. Heat to boiling, stirring constantly till think.

Fold together sauce with chicken and vegetables.

Pour into uncooked pastry shell. Cover with pastry.

Bake in preheated oven at 220 C for 30 min.

Wash the dishes while the pie is in the oven.

While your husband has a beer after he helped with the cooking.

Keep an eye on the pie! Make sure it doesn't burn in the oven. I turned the oven down to 150 C when it started getting a bit too brown on top.

Then enjoy your pie with a glass of wine!

PS Next time I will fry some onion and garlic too and add some mushrooms.

Warm Chicken Salad

For the past two weeks I've been eating a lot of salad. And I've been trying to be creative with it to keep it interesting. Most days by lunch time I was so hungry that I forgot to take a picture of each salad before eating it, but I remembered this one time!

You need some Thai red curry paste for this one. The recipe says to mix the chicken pieces and curry paste and refrigerate overnight. If you plan ahead and can do this, great, but I've made it many times by just mixing the paste and cooking the chicken straight away. This time though I did plan ahead! I planned so well, I planned for us to have chicken for dinner the night before so I could keep some of the chicken separate for my salad. But then had a change of plan the next day and had a salmon salad instead. So this time the chicken was WELL marinated for two days!

I didn't have lemon grass so just left that out. Same with the red onion and the mint. Also sadly didn't have the fish sauce this time so just made a little dressing with oil and lemon juice. But do try the fish sauce, it's delicious.

Oh and I don't heat the tomato and mint. So I cook the chicken and then just add it over a normal salad with whatever you like in it.

Try it!

WARM CHICKEN SALAD

500 g chicken breast

2 t Thai red curry paste

1 t chopped chilli

garlic

1 stem fresh lemon grass, white part only

1 red onion, chopped

2 tomatoes, cut into wedges

1/2 c chopped fresh mint

1/4 c chopped fresh coriander

400 g mixed salad leaves

Dressing:

1 1/2 T soft brown sugar

2 T fish sauce

2 T lime juice

2 t oil

1. Cut chicken. Mix with curry paste, chilli, garlic and lemon grass. Refrigerate overnight.
2. Spray pan. Cook chicken. Remove form pan. Cook onion. Return chicken and any juices and tomato, mint and coriander. Stir until heated and set aside.
3. Dressing: Mix all ingredients.
4. Toss all together.

Andre's invention

When we came back from our weekend away at Engelberg André volunteered to cook dinner. I was his assistant. We had some potatoes that needed to be eaten and quite a variety of veggies in the fridge. So André put it all together and made us a delicious meal. He's quite good at cooking and his food is always delicious :-) Here's what he did:

He fried an onion and some garlic (always onion and garlic!) then added one chopped chicken breast. When the chicken was cooked he added some zucchini, chilli and mushrooms. I boiled the peeled potatoes. Made a mushroom sauce using half a packet of mushroom soup powder, mixed with milk and white wine. Poured this over the ingredients in the pan. It got quite thick so we added some water to get the right consistency. André is quite particular about how thick a sauce should be...

When the ingredients in the pan had done enough bubbling in the sauce, André arranged the sliced potatoes in the bottom of an oven dish.

Poured the veggie-chicken-mushroom sauce over the potatoes and arranged the rest of the potatoes over the top.

He added some salami and grated cheese.

In the oven until the cheese starts turning golden brown.

Mmmm... a good invention! I just had the left overs for lunch!

Chicken salad

It was too hot tonight for anything else besides salad so I made a quick chicken salad.

I made up a marinade using about two tablespoons apricot jam (or jelly for the Americans - in SA jelly = jello - not something you'd put on your bread.) Anyway this is the apricot spread you put on bread. Ok, moving on. Add about a teaspoon of mustard, a little bit of vegetable stock or chicken stock with a little bit of hot water to mix it all up. I like veg stock, it gives good flavour. I did not measure anything, just add as you wish.

Pour the sauce into a pan and add the chicken pieces. Here you can see how much sauce I had compared to chicken. You don't need too much.

I cooked it on medium heat. Then got impatient and turned the heat right up! The chicken went golden brown and the sauce cooks away to form a slightly sticky sweet sauce. Mmmm... I like sweet...

Let the chicken cool and add to your salad. We love the bread and cheese here so had some of that with our salad.

I actually started running today, because I've been enjoying the cheese and chocolates too much! Now let's just hope I can keep up the exercise!