A Craving Sparked From Frozen Food

You know, as college students living on your own, it’s increasingly difficult to find a way to eat during the week. Sometimes you’ll scrounge for leftovers brought back from the weekend from home, but most of the time you’ll eat out and waste money. It’s a typical “food” day today, meaning there is absolutely nothing to eat. I have with me here one banana and a bottle of water. The fridge is empty, but hey, maybe there is something in the freezer for me. There is! It’s a small box and it’s a Marie Callender’s Chicken Pot Pie. It looks so good, even if it’s just a box. The only bad thing is, it’s not mine, it is my roommates.

Luckily, he is nice enough to let me eat the last one. As I microwave it I can already smell every single ingredient in the pot pie. I take it out and completely destroy it. Have you ever noticed how the best part of any pie is the pie crust? Man, the pie-crust on the pot pie was amazing. It’s probably made of a puff pastry or something; it’s ridiculously flaky (in a good way).

This is where the light-bulb went off. This is where I told myself “Wow, I think chicken pot pies are my favorite food to eat”. There is just something about the chicken pot pie. Maybe that’s why it has the label ‘comfort food’. It’s just as portable as a pizza, but it offers so much more. Every single ingredient put into chicken pot-pies are perfectly made for one another. Potatoes, vegetables, chicken, gravy, PIE-CRUST…WOW. I’m sold. I’m going to make my own.

There’s a web-site I always go to for my recipes: recipezaar.com. The recipes offered here are guaranteed to be amazing. The recipe looked relatively simple, and lucky for me I had almost every ingredient that I needed. A quick stop at the grocery store is all I need. I bought myself a bag of potatoes, pie crusts, half & half, and chicken broth. I had frozen vegetables and chicken at home already. Ready to cook!

The entire process was fairly simple and straightforward. The hardest part with the chicken pot pie was perfecting the gravy. All you had to do for the potatoes were peel them and cut them into chunks. For the chicken, I baked four chicken thighs at 475F for 40 minutes. They came out great. I cooked the onion, potatoes, frozen veggies together with some butter. Then I added the half & half along wit hteh chicken broth to create the sauce. You let it boil so that it's allowed to thicken. Add the chicken, and stir. Then you pour the mixture into the pie-crust. First-time around it was too thick, second-time around it was perfect. A funny story goes with the ‘first-time around’ though. I finished what goes inside the pie and I poured it into the pie crust. I guess the mixture was too hot, making the foil pan warm and forcing it to be a little flimsy. As I am carrying the completed pie to the oven, the entire thing just collapses on me and I drop the whole pie onto the ground. I should’ve taken a picture of it, it was such a sad sight. I was really bummed out, but I had extra of both mixture and pie so I made another one. Hey, you learn from your mistakes. Baked it for around 45 minutes at 375F and....voila!


Sorry, crappy phone picture.

It was delicious. After making it for the first time, I re-bought whatever I needed at the end of the week and made two more. One for me, and I personally delivered the other to a few good friends. They loved it!

Hmmm, I’m going to try to tie this in with Tampopo, however, it sounds impossible now. But I actually did grab ramen at a ramen shop back at home on the weekend after watching the film. I ordered the signature ramen bowl. The cool thing is that my friend works there as a waiter and usually hooks me up with free food!