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Quick & Easy: Chicken Pot Pie by Foodie’s Chef Laura Brennan
February 14, 2020
This is a recipe that uses leftover rotisserie chicken, a good quality store-bought cream of chicken soup and a sheet of ready-made puff pastry! In the words of a well-known TV Chef: “How easy is that” !
Choose any pie dish or baking dish, combine ingredients with the creamed soup, top with a pastry sheet and pop it in the oven.
It’s dinner, on the table, in under an hour, definitely.
(I used a 9” standard pie tin and 1 sheet of puff pastry and based the recipe on this.)
- Prep: 25 mins
- Cook: 35 mins
- Yields: 4
Ingredients
¾ cup white or Spanish onion, small dice
½ cup celery cut into small-dice
½ cup peeled carrots, cut into small dice
2-3 tablespoons olive or vegetable oil
Kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper
3 cups cooked rotisserie chicken, shredded or diced
½ teaspoon fresh thyme leaves or ¼ teaspoon dried thyme
½ cup frozen green peas, rinsed under cold running water (Shake off excess water.)
1 or 2 -16-ounce jars Rao’s Chicken & Gnocchi Soup (or Bell’s Chicken Gravy or Amy’s condensed Cream of Mushroom Soup-available at Foodie’s)
Optional: ¼ to ½ cup cream (heavy, light or half-and-half)
1-14-ounce package of pastry (I used Dufours, all-butter puff pastry. But there are other brands.)
2 tablespoons softened butter, divided
Egg wash: 1 large egg beaten with a fork and a pinch of kosher salt
Directions
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Butter the baking dish with a piece of the softened butter and set aside.
Remove the pastry from the freezer. Gently unroll it and lay it on a sheet pan and refrigerate the pastry to defrost.
Put a saucepan on medium heat and add 2 tablespoons of oil to the pan. When warmed, but not smoking-hot, add the diced onions to the pot along with a pinch of salt. Stir to coat the onions in the oil. Cover the pot and turn heat to low and cook for 3-4 minutes or until the onions have softened and become translucent. Remove the lid and add both the diced celery and carrot. Add another pinch of salt and a tablespoon of butter and/or oil to the vegetables. Cover the pot again and cook over low heat; checking and stirring often. The properly cooked vegetables will have not taken on any color and will be a bit juicy.
Off the heat add the diced/shredded chicken, the fresh or dried thyme and whatever creamed soup you are using. (You may have to transfer all the ingredients to a large bowl to mix everything well.)
The mixture should appear well-coated and luscious, not too loose or stiff.
Add more soup or cream, bit-by-bit to adjust texture.
Taste the filling and season to your taste. (You may find that the creamed soup is very seasoned, precluding the necessity of adding more salt to the filling, but…. fresh ground black pepper is a must!
Add the filling to your prepared baking dish.
Lay the still-chilled pastry sheet on top of your filling. Tuck in the edges and trim away any over-hanging pastry with a small knife. Use a pastry brush and coat the top of the pastry with the prepared beaten egg wash.
Use the small knife to cut four ½-inch slits in the center of the dough. This will allow steam to escape and the dough to rise more fully during the baking process.
Bake for 25-35 minutes or until pastry is flaky and golden. (The length of baking time will depend on the amount of filling and your baking vessel. Deeper filling will take longer to get hot than a shallow-filled dish.)
If you insert a metal skewer or thin-bladed knife quickly into the center of the pie, the heat of the pie will be transferred to the blade. Quickly, quickly tap the blade/skewer on the top of your hand to gauge how hot the filling is. Don’t linger with the blade/skewer…merely tap the top of your hand!
A hot blade/skewer equals hot filling.
Remove pie from oven and let it briefly rest for five minutes.
Serve and eat HOT!
