Tonight was pot pie night -- once the weather cools off I like to do a pot pie or meat pie once a week. So I did a pot pie with leftover chicken from Sunday riffing from Kenny Shopsin's recipe, which is a cream-oriented (as opposed to a béchamel or for that matter my mother's pot pie which I've decided is really derived from a Scottish stovie). He has you add leftover mashed or baked potatoes early on as an additional thickener. I had some nice soft carmelized roasted butternut squash languishing in the fridge, so that went in instead. So squash, onions, carrots, some leftover corn, homemade stock, it was pretty sweet and rich before I even added the cream. Then I remembered those spice and wine-steeped raisins sitting in the back of the fridge since the last time I made the Ad Hoc rainbow chard. I threw those in too, which made this a downright decadent pot pie.
For 70's cred (and an overall manageable size so my leftovers don't create still more leftovers) I used Pepperidge Farm Puff Pastry Shells instead of my usual frozen pie crust.
Anyhow, it was good, but the girls wouldn't touch it.
It's just great when you're cooking a lot from scratch and the quality of crap cluttering up your refrigerator goes up, particularly when you've developed enough of a coherent style that most of the stuff goes together easily. Also, a big step is just remembering what's actually in there. Throwing stuff out regularly is key to that -- you need to try to get to the point where you perpetually have your fridge contents memorized.
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