Welcome to the Saturday after Thanksgiving edition of What's For Dinner? The weather's been beautiful this week, and I finally got into the garden yesterday to clean up the last of the tomato and pepper plants. I brought in half a dozen ripening Roma tomatoes, the last of the season, and shook my head over the ever-optimistic Early Girl plant that has a dozen flowers ready for pollination. We've had three good frosts, plant. The bees are hibernating and it's time to give up for the year! Time to go back into the kitchen and figure out what to do with all that leftover food from Thursday.
(At right: Completely gratuitous image of seed pod from a green pepper harvested from my garden. I thought it looked really neat and have absolutely no other reason for posting it.)
Leftovers. You've probably got a lot of them this week, and the thought of Yet Another Turkey Sandwich makes your blood run cold. Turkey soup? Always yummy, but maybe you've had enough of that as well. So what else can be made with turkey leftovers?
Friday morning I woke up knowing I was going to make a pot pie.
Pot pie, stripped down to its essence, consists of a crust on top, possibly a crust on bottom, vegetables, chicken or turkey, and gravy. Although commercial pies always seem to include peas and diced carrots, those are certainly not required. I happen to like green beans better than peas, although I've successfully used edamame (shelled sweet soybeans) in the place of the peas before. Broccoli could be good, too, although it would fall apart with the long cooking. If you don't require crisp-tender florets in your finished dish, go for it.
Hint: Glory Foods now offers pre-diced rutabaga and turnips in bags in the produce section of the grocery store, if you like them and don't want to hassle with the splitting maul and wood axe to cut them up. |
In this pot pie, I used what I had on hand: a couple of carrots, a medium potato, an onion, a handful or two of frozen French-cut green beans. (Use a can of green beans, drained, if you don't have frozen ones.) Mushrooms would have been a fabulous addition, but I didn't have any in the fridge and didn't want to run back to the store to get them. If you happen to like parsnips, rutabaga, or turnips, dice one of those and throw in there too.
This recipe looks a bit alarming, but it really isn't difficult -- I've just given you a lot of options to choose from. It takes maybe 30 minutes to put together and about an hour to bake.
Turkey Pot Pie
Preheat the oven to 350°.
Gravy
- 4 tablespoons butter or vegetable oil
- 4 tablespoons flour
- 2 cups chicken stock
- 1 teaspoon salt, if needed
- Heat the chicken stock almost to boiling. (If it boils, no biggie. It just doesn't have to boil.)
- While the stock is heating, melt the butter (1 minute in the microwave). Stir the flour into the melted butter with a fork or whisk, being sure to blend well. Microwave the mixture on High for 1 minute. Stir.
- Add the heated stock to the flour/butter roux, stirring constantly with fork or whisk. The gravy should thicken as you stir. If it isn't thick enough once it's all combined, microwave it again for 30-60 seconds and stir to mix thoroughly.
- Taste and add the salt, if needed. Set aside.
Filling
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 1 medium onion, diced
- 2 carrots, scraped and sliced thinly
- 1 medium potato, diced fairly small
- 1 can green beans, drained, or about 2 cups frozen beans
- 1 to 2 cups leftover chicken or turkey, diced
- In a medium saucepan, sauté the onion and carrots in the butter until softened, about 5 minutes.
- Add the remaining vegetables, chicken or turkey, and gravy. Mix thoroughly.
Crust Options
OR
- 2 pre-fab pie crusts, either frozen or in stick form to be rolled out (Warning: most pre-fab crusts contain transfats. Read the labels.)
OR
- 8-12 sheets prepared phyllo dough and melted butter
- If you are using homemade or stick crust, roll out one crust and place in the bottom of your pie pan. If you are using frozen crust, you're already good to go. For phyllo bottom crust (not really recommended; it gets soggy and greasy), place one sheet of phyllo dough on a clean surface and brush with melted butter. Top with a second sheet, butter, and repeat, until you have a stack of four sheets of dough. Place this in the bottom of your pie pan and trim any excess.
- Add the prepared filling.
- Top with the second crust and cut four to six slits to allow steam to escape. For phyllo top crust, you may need two sets of four buttered sheets, depending on the size of your pie pan. If you do, overlap the two sets of phyllo sheets about 1" in the middle; trim away the edges.
- Bake the pie at 350° for 1 hour, or until the crust is browned and done.
Serves 4-6.
Yum! Lunch for four days!
On to....
Afterthoughts. In my ongoing quest to reduce the glycemic load of the foods I eat, I spent some time playing around with an alternative to traditional bread dressing for Thanksgiving. In last week's collaborative diary, I was trying to minimize the amount of space my offering would take and decided not to include this next dish. I did, however, mean to link to it and forgot to do so; as an afterthought, here it is for the low-GI people.
Wild Rice-Barley Stuffing
- 1 cup wild rice
- 2 tablespoons butter or olive oil
- 1 large onion, diced
- 2 stalks celery, chopped (or 1 can water chestnuts, drained)
- 2 carrots, scraped and sliced thinly
- 1 cup pearl barley (uncooked)
- 1 teaspoon savory seasoning
- 2 teaspoons sage
- 1 teaspoon fresh-ground pepper
- salt to taste (about 1 teaspoon)
- 4 cups chicken stock (or 3 cups stock + 1 cup white wine)
- Preheat oven to 375°.
- Rinse wild rice in cold water and drain. Bring 4 cups water to boil in a saucepan; add rice and boil gently for 20 minutes. Drain and place in a large casserole dish.
- While rice is parboiling, heat the butter or olive oil in a skillet. Sauté the onions, celery, and carrots until softened, about 5 -10 minutes. (If using water chestnuts instead of celery, you don't need to sauté them.) Add vegetables to casserole dish with rice.
- Place pearl barley with rice and vegetables in dish; stir to mix vegetables and grains.
- Stir seasonings into chicken stock and pour over top. Cover tightly. Bake at 375° for about 1 hour and 15 minutes, or until liquid is absorbed and barley is tender.
Serves 8-10 as a side dish.
Notes: I used water chestnuts because I don't normally cook with celery yet still wanted something to give the dressing a little crunch. I'm not completely satisfied with the seasoning yet; it made a great base for soaking up gravy (!) but I'd be happier if it had more flavor on its own. All in all, I'm pleased with it, though. And it wouldn't take much substitution -- just use vegetable stock for the chicken and olive oil for the butter -- to make it completely vegan.
Another plus I just thought of: If you have a lot of this left over because Uncle George ain't eatin' none of that-there hippie food, make a big pot of stock from the turkey carcass, stir the leftover stuffing into about 8-10 cups of the stock, add about a half-cup of heavy cream, and you will have a fabulous Cream of Turkey and Wild Rice Soup.
Update: I just made this Accidental Cream of Turkey and Wild Rice Soup for dinner. It was absolutely excellent. Skip the dressing and go straight to the soup!
Okay, I see you, there in the back with your hand up. "Hey, Kate, you promised pie! Where's the pie?" Fear not, patient one. Your time has come.
Pie! When the kids were little and both of us were working and we had more money, we used to go out to eat as a family once a week on Saturday nights. A favorite place was Morrison's Cafeteria because the kids could have chicken nuggets and mac and cheese while we grownups ate sophisticated fare. Like meatloaf and mashed potatoes.
At any rate, I loved the egg custard pie at Morrison's because it wasn't terribly sweet or crusted over in nutmeg. The balance of flavors was perfect for my tastes, and apparently for others' as well because they sold a lot of it. When Morrison's went out of business, I was sad that I had never bothered to ask for the recipe.
Fast forward to 2005. By this time I was an experienced Jazz Cook, accustomed to mixing and playing with flavors and pretty confident with creating recipes. I can't recall what made me think of the pie, but it occurred to me that egg custard pie couldn't be that difficult to figure out. It's basically just a quiche with no vegetables and a little sugar, right?
This one is almost exactly like I remember the pies at Morrison's. Not too sweet, not too spicy, honest flavor. Use the very best fresh free-range eggs you can get.
Egg Custard Pie
- 4 eggs
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 1/8 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 cups half-and-half (fat-free actually works in this recipe)
- 1 (9 inch) refrigerated pie crust
- Preheat oven to 425°.
- In a large bowl, combine eggs, sugar, nutmeg, salt, and vanilla. Mix just enough to incorporate all the ingredients.
- Pour the egg mixture into crust.
- Bake at 425° for 40 minutes, or until a knife inserted into the center of the pie comes out clean. The center of the pie will appear slightly jiggly. Allow to cool.
Makes 8 servings.
Next week we will go back to culinary adventures á la cookiebear, who always has an entertaining story to tell. Enjoy!