Chicken Pot Pie

Ingredients

2 pie crusts*
1 stick of butter
1 large onion, diced
3 large carrots, peeled and diced (or about half a bag of
frozen diced carrots)
1 cup green peas
1 stalk celery, diced
Salt
Pepper
½ tsp ground thyme, if you have it
¼ cups all-purpose flour
1 cups dry white wine, if you have it. Chicken stock or broth if you don’t
Juice of half a lemon
2 cups milk
⅓ cups chopped fresh parsley
Approx. 4 cups cooked, diced chicken
1 egg, mixed with a splash of water

Step 1

Preheat your oven to 400º. Grease a 9” pie pan.

Step 2

Put a medium sized pot over medium heat and toss in the stick of butter, onion, carrots, peas, celery, salt, pepper, and thyme. Sauté all that together until the onions are translucent and you can cut the carrots with whatever spoon you’re using to stir. Stir in the flour. Cook that a minute or two, and keep stirring. It may stick a little anyway. That’s ok, because you’re gonna deglaze with the wine (or stock). Dump that in now, and scrape up the stuff that stuck to the bottom of the pot, then add the lemon juice.

Cook that down a minute or so. It should be alarmingly thick and gloopy. Go ahead and stir in the milk. That should help thin it out. Turn the heat down a notch or two, and let it all come back up to a simmer, stirring it pretty often. After 5 or 10 minutes, it’ll thicken up–we don’t want to go all the way back to gloopy, but gravy territory is great. Mix in the parsley and the chicken, and give it a taste. Do a bit of salt and pepper improv. We trust your discernment, but if you can’t figure out what it’s missing, it’s probably missing salt. When you like it, turn off the heat.

Step 3

Put the first crust in the bottom of the pie pan. Add the filling, top with the upper crust, and roll/crimp the edges in a way that makes sense to you. I believe in your artistic vision. Cut a few vent slits in the top. Brush the top and edges with the egg wash, and then sprinkle with a few flakes of salt.

Step 4

Put it in the oven. Check it at 30 minutes. If it’s browning too much, you can cover the edges with aluminum foil. Or rotate it. Mine was nicely golden at around 50 minutes, but anywhere in the 40-50 minute zone might be what works for you. Don’t stress about “doneness,” because you already cooked everything except the crust. If it looks pretty, it’s done.

Footnotes

*Feel free to just buy them, but if you have time and a food processor, it’s worth it to blitz together:

3 cups flour
1.5 tsp salt
2 sticks cold, diced butter

Then, in a different bowl, mix together

2/3 cups cold water
1 tbsp apple cider vinegar

While the food processor is going, drizzle in the vinegar water until a dough ball starts kinda whipping around the food processor bowl (you may not need all the liquid). Dump the dough onto a floured surface, shape it into two balls, wrap them each in plastic, and pop them in the fridge for as long as it takes you to make the rest of the pot pie. When you’re ready to assemble, dump each ball onto a well-floured surface, and roll into a 12ish inch circle.