Hello, my lovelies! I know, I know, I've been neglecting you like you were a three-month old strapped in a car seat and I'm "weekend daddy" with a fistful of ones and a free cover coupon to the local titty bar. It's been a very busy couple of weeks, and I refuse to apologize for having so much fun in real life that I don't have time to cuss and rant on teh Webs.
This past weekend we visited my miraculously-recovered mom, scared off her stalker neighbor, and got her righteously high. All-around good times, especially if you've ever seen my mom stoned. Fucking hilarious. Better than putting a sock on a cat's head, I tell you.Too bad it's a damned three-hour drive between where I live now and where I grew up, because when we got home we were both too tired to cook and absolutely sick of fast food. Enter God's gift to lazy fucks with no desire to eat three Big Macs in two days: the grocery-store rotisserie chicken.
Cheap as hell, and pretty okay, for the money. I still prefer my roasted chicken (clean out the gizzard package, unless you've bought a delicious air-frozen chicken which I love but boycott just the same because they don't include the neck and heart and liver and gizzards, and THAT'S JUST NOT RIGHT--and stuff the cavity with onions and garlic, after you've rubbed the whole damned thing inside and out with salt and pepper and maybe a little thyme and rosemary if you're feeling particularly ambitious, throw it in a roasting pan, surround it with carrots and potatoes, and cook at 350 for about 2 hours), but when I'm wallowing in salt-induced edema and lethargy, rotisserie chickens and a bag of salad feed my family without making me feel like a COMPLETE white-trash slut.
And the great thing is, whether your chicken is roasted at the store or in your oven, after you're done picking through it for a meal, you've still got plenty of trash meat and a nice juicy carcass, perfect for one of my top-ten all-time-favorite foods, CHICKEN MOTHERFUCKING POT PIE.
And here's the irony--I don't like pie. Not the fruity kind, not the nutty kind, not the custardy kind. But then, I don't like sweet things as a general rule. Give me Slim Jims over Twinkies any day. I much prefer salt and grease to sugar and flour. Here's more irony--my cholesterol and blood pressure are fine, but I'm a borderline diabetic. FML.
But you put some meat and gravy and mushy peas inside that pie pastry, and I'm all over it like a frat boy on a preacher's daughter during Rush Week. I get OBSCENE with the moaning and the eye-rolling and the touching myself under the table and . . . um, what? Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
Anyway. I do pot pies with leftover lamb and steak, as well. Not so much with pork. I don't know why, but it probably has something to do with the fact that we package our pork chops after cutting them from super-cheap loins so that we don't really *have* leftovers, but sometimes a steak is just TOO MUCH, or it's Easter and we get sent home with the better part of a roast leg of lamb. The only difference with chicken is that I have the carcass to make my own stock with.
For stock, what you want to do is dig your hands in and pull every single shred of viable meat off that bastard, and set it aside. Take all those poor bedraggled bones and bits of cartilage and skin and fat, throw them in a pot with a few bay leaves, some roughly-chopped carrots, onions, and celery, and simmer it for most of a day. Strain it, and reduce it till you've only got about two cups left. This will be your gravy later, so don't fuck it up, because fucking up gravy is punishable by six months spent watching "Family Matters" re-runs, all the Erkel-heavy episodes, or at least it will be once I cash in on a few life insurance policies and hire those mercenaries I've been daydreaming about.
Once you've got the stock strained, but before you reduce it, go ahead and peel two carrots and two small-ish potatoes, cut them up into fairly small chunks, and boil them in that stock until soft Just before they're done, add some frozen peas. Dip them out with a slotted spoon and add them to the chicken.
Anyway, for a good potpie, you need a seriously kick-ass pastry crust. I don't even LIKE pie crust, and I LOVE this shit.
Sift or mix with a fork:
2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
Cut in
1 cup shortening
until the lumps are about pea-sized
Mix in
1/2 cup VERY cold water. Form into 2 lumps, wrap in plastic, stick in the fridge for at least 3-4 hours, or up to 2 days.
The trick with pastry dough is to A) not melt the fat until it's baked, and B) don't over-work it. With breads you want to beat and knead the crap out of your flour until it rolls over and forms strand-y proteins; with pastry you want it to remain all aloof and shit so that the un-melted fat will cook it where its snooty layers lie so that the end result flakes off like your freshman-year college girlfriend when she discovered mushrooms and Phish, and also melts in your mouth like that very same girlfriend.
When rolled out nice and thin, this will provide enough dough for two delicious layers of flaky, toe-curling pastry, plus two sheets of pie crust cookies (take the scraps, put them on a couple of greased cookie sheets, sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar, and bake at 350).
So when you've got your stock all nice and reduced, you can NOW salt and pepper it. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT salt before reducing. You'll be sorry if you do.
In your cast-iron skillet (and if you don't have one, go ahead and kick yourself in the nuts, because you have no business cooking) melt two tablespoons of butter (or some sort of vegetable oil if you're a big weeping vagina or have had bypass surgery) over medium heat. Whisk in two tablespoons of flour, and KEEP WHISKING until it turns sort of light-brown and smells more like nuts than wallpaper paste. This is called a ROUX, and you'd damned well better remember it, because it's pure awesome and the basis of most delicious cooking.
When you've got your roux nice and light-to-medium brown, start whisking in the chicken stock. When it's medium-thin-thick, go ahead and pour it in the bowl with the big chicken-pea-carrot-potato mess. You might want to add a little extra chicken stock, or hold back on the gravy. What you're going for is a nice, sticky, glompy mess that's not too dry and not runny.
Stuff that shit into your pie crust, cover it with the second crust, cut some slits to vent, and bake it for about an hour at 350. You'll want to start out with the edges covered in foil, or they're going to get all sorts of burnt and nasty.
And this is how you make your inner critic shut the fuck up about being a lousy housewife for spending seven bucks on a rotisserie chicken. My therapist says that my inner voices are too Midwestern for my own good. I say that nobody will prescribe me the *really* good drugs to shut them up, so I have to make do with fatty fatty gravy-soaked food, so whose fault is it that I'm fat? The psychiatric community's, that's who.
