Two "Chicken" Pot Pies and an Apple Tart

Last week my friend Jon made some delicious chicken and "chicken-less" pot pies and shared it with some friends and I for dinner on a rainy spring evening in Carrboro. The chicken-less pie (above) had quorn patty chunks and the chicken pie (below) had gen-u-ine chicken (and an overflowing crust).


Both pies had the same vegetable ingredients of pearl onions (an excellent addition), peas, corn, carrots, and potatoes in gravy. The folks who tried both said they couldn't really tell the difference between the two.


I contributed a free-jazz apple tart I made, drawing from a combination of past attempted apple tart recipes.


The recipe I made up was approximately as follows:

Free-jazz apple tart

Ingredients:
3 tart apples, cored and very thinly sliced
1/2 c. homemade apple butter
1/4 c. homemade apple-rosemary jelly
juice of 1/2 lemon
raw sugar for sprinkling
nothing-in-the-house pie crust recipe, halved (bottom crust only)

Prepare crust with recipe found here. Refrigerate. Core and thinly slice 3 apples and place in a bowl. Squeeze juice of half of a lemon over the apples and stir. Roll out dough and place in a greased and floured tart pan. Spread apple butter on crust and place apple slices in concentric circles over the apple butter. Sprinkle with raw sugar and bake at 375 for approximately 35-45 minutes. Cool. When tart is still warm, heat apple-rosemary jelly and drizzle over the tart. Slice and serve with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.

I brought the tart over in the double-decker Amish pie carrying basket my parents gave me for Christmas last year.


After a full-day in the library working on my thesis, this pie dinner was just the perfect treat.

Zingerman's Pot Pies

I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan for a hot minute this past weekend, and pretty much went directly from the Detroit airport to the Jewish deli-turned foodie phenom, Zingerman's for my standard #36 on sourdough with a new pickle (basically a veggie reuben with coleslaw instead of sauerkraut).

I found not only the promise of one of my favorite lunches, but an array of pot pies available there during the months of January and February. It's a good thing they were out of their vegetarian pie option, or I would have had quite a time deciding between "Lila & Izzie's Skokie Skidoo" sandwich and the "Fungi Pot Pie."
I was intrigued by this "Daria's Dingle Pie," which they purport to be "a salute to the miners on the Dingle Peninsula of Ireland," and is apparently a standard Irish savory pie recipe, traditionally sold at Lammas Fairs during the last week of August.

This tribute to the miner in pie form, though, made me wonder why Zingerman's wasn't offering a pasty-- the Cornish savory pie that was frequently consumed and popularized by Finnish miners in Michigan's Upper Penninsula. Perhaps they'll cover that later in some future 'Traditional foods of Michigan' or 'Traditional foods of the Midwest' or 'Traditional foods mistaken for stripper-garb' display.

Let's Talk About Root Crops...

Veggie Pot Pie

For a Christmas dinner side dish, I made roasted root vegetable/goat cheese packets (wrapped in phyllo dough), adapted from the Williams-Sonoma cookbook, Cooking from the Farmer's Market. They were a big hit, but I had a lot of roasted root veggies left over, so we put them into pot pies! I made a veggie pot pie, and my parents made a chicken pot pie. 

The roasted root veggies included:
1 yellow onion
3 leeks
3 turnips
1 rutabaga
4 potatoes
3 parsnips
4 carrots
You could also use 1 bulb fennel or 1 celeriac, though they didn't have it at the grocery store!

Marinate in olive oil and sprinkle with thyme, rosemary (or herbs de provence) and salt and pepper. Let sit until pie crust and gravy is ready.

Veggie gravy:
Make a rue with butter and flour. add veggie stock and thyme & rosemary or herbs de provence.
Put root veggies into the pie crust and mix in gravy. add top shell and bake for about 45 minutes at 350.


ENJOY (with white wine and a fireplace, if possible)!

Da DEEP Dish

A few weeks ago some friends and I made our way to Rokeby for the Superior Concept Monsters puppet workday--to help build puppets for the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade and to make food for the people who help build puppets.

Sara, Heather, and I were on kitchen duty, and in one mad hour of aproned girl talk, loud dance music, and cooking, whipped out a chicken pot pie, vegetable pot pie, chicken stew, chard, salad, and apple pie. Since both pie plates were being used for the dinner pies, the apple pie had to be made DEEP dish style. The deep dish, folks, is not a poor man's pie. It requires plenty of heaping fruit.

But the deep dish= deep delish= deep daze. just ask Brodie:



Unfortunately, no pictures were taken of the savory pies.