The Anti – Pie

I tried to make a pie, a pie I tried to make

I defrosted the puff pastry, it all started to look tasty

Trouble started when trying to serve

Coz this pie showed me no lurv

It went everywhere on the plate

It just wouldn’t hold its shape

In a nutshell that’s what happened; I didn’t really research a lot of chicken pie recipes. I honestly thought it would be easy because I’m not making the pastry myself.

The filling was delicious even though I had to add the pastry to the plate to make it look like something pie-like.

Let me know where I went wrong? How do you hold your pie together 😉

Ingredients

• 1 roll puff pastry
• 4 chicken breasts
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 onion
• 2 garlic cloves or three or more
• 1 stick of celery
• 4 carrots
• 1 can whole corn
• 1 can peas (optional)
• 2 sprigs of Thyme
• 1 punnet mushrooms
• 1 cup chicken stock
• 250ml cream
• 1 teaspoon flour
• 1 egg
• Salt, pepper

Basically, all these ingredients are optional because you can add whatever you like to your chicken pie. The filling should not be runny as this will affect the bottom of the pastry (soggy bottoms yo). Some people just do pastry lids – I’m not about that life.

Method

Grease your pie dish.

Roll out the pastry on a floured surface, cut it in half, use one half at the bottom of the dish and set aside the other half.

Season the chicken with salt and pepper and fry in a little oil until cooked through – set aside.

Dice the carrots, onion, celery, garlic, thyme and onion and fry it in butter until softish

Reintroduce the chicken, add the mushrooms and stock and allow to simmer for about +/- 20 mins

Strain this mixture over a bowl to get the rich, flavoursome chicken stock.

Set the veggie/chicken mix aside and add the now strained stock to the pan. Add flour and cream.

At this point you need to whisk until the sauce becomes thick, I think I didn’t wait until it was thick enough and this is why my pie couldn’t hold it together! Maybe this is also why some recipes use mushroom soup?

Add the chicken/veggie mix to the sauce, add the corn and peas and fold everything to combine evenly.

Then add the complete mixture to your pastry lined pie dish, cover with the 2^nd half of the pastry. I used a fork to secure the edges. Egg wash the top of the pastry for that golden brown finish.

Bake for approximately 25 mins until golden brown.

I served mine with a green salad, but you can do what you like