Chicken Pot Pie

My wife is a little crazy and I love her for it. This week when I had poached a chicken, she nonchalantly and quite apropos of nothing (that I could ascertain; who knows what was buzzing around in her infinitely circular brain?) asked me to make a chicken pot pie, saying that she would really like that a lot. Why not? Anything for her.

So I poach all the vegetables, make the gravy, make the crust, bake the pies, and get them to the table. Just before we dig in, she says, "I've never had pot pie before." All the while, I assume that she has asked me to make her a pot pie because she had eaten one and found it delicious enough to want again.

Don't you think that she would have said to me, "I've never had a pot pie before and really want to try one! Would you make me a chicken pot pie?" Nut!

Chicken Pot Pie

Pie Vegetables

You can use any vegetables that you want for your pies. I had planned to use celery, leeks, carrots, and green beans. When I got home from the store, I found that someone (not naming names) had roasted all the green beans that I was going to use in the pies. So I substituted some broccoli florets.

I brought some salted water to a boil and gave each of the vegetables a quick parboil. I cooked each vegetable in sequence until it was crisp-soft and put it in ice water to stop the cooking. Meanwhile, I picked a bit of chicken off a carcass that I had poached the day before.

Pies Ready for Topping

I brought the chicken stock that I had made the day before to a roiling boil and thickened it with a corn starch slurry. I poured the thick gravy over the vegetables and chicken, then seasoned with salt, plenty of black pepper, and a mound of freshly chopped parsley.

In retrospect, I should have used a beurre manié (flour and butter mix) to thicken the gravy. I was trying to back off the calories by using corn starch, but the gravy broke down in the oven later, something that flour will not do. Even an old chef learns the hard way (to be fair to myself, in my restaurant career, I did not get any experience in low-fat, low-calorie cooking!).

Pies Ready for Oven

We don't have any special dishes for pot pie and I thought that it would be nice to make individual ones, so I repurposed a couple of cereal bowls. I topped each with pie crust (recipe below), trimmed the crust, crimped it into the rim of the bowls with the tines of a fork, slit the crusts for steam vents, and brushed the tops with egg wash. 

The pies want to be in a hot oven (425F) until the top crusts brown nicely. I want to say that these took 35-40 minutes, but I wasn't watching the clock like a hawk.

Pie Crust Recipe

This is my tried and true all-butter super flaky pie crust. I would love to say that I learned it from my mother or her mother, inveterate pie bakers both, but that wouldn't be the truth. They were diehard Southerners and it was Crisco for their pie crust or nothing. I gave up on trans fats and hydrogenated shortening a very, very long time ago in favor of butter or (rarely) lard.

The following recipe will make a generous single pie crust (with generally enough left over to make a lattice top), depending on what size pie plate you are making. I measure my baking ingredients by weight in grams. If you do not have a scale, get one. It will be the single best thing you can do to improve your baking.

150 grams all purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

140 grams cold butter, in small cubes

ice water as needed

Spin the flour and salt in the food processor for a second to mix it. Add the cold butter cubes and pulse. Pulse until the butter resembles really small peas in size. Add a couple tablespoons of water and pulse. Add water in dribbles and pulse in between. When the dough just starts to come together, bring it out onto a floured counter and shape it into a flat disc. Wrap it in film and refrigerate for an hour to cool it off. After this rest, it will be ready to use.

Fish and Black Bean Tostadas

Fish and Black Bean Tostadas

We eat a lot of tacos suaves at our house. Sometimes we are looking for a little different texture, so I have been making tostadas recently. The latest batch is fish and black bean, the black beans helping to stretch the expensive fish and also to bulk the dish so that we consume fewer tortillas. We might only eat 3 or 4 tostadas, but if we're just having tacos, we're probably going to eat 5 or 6.

This dish has three components: the tostadas, the beans, and the fish. If you need a refresher on making tostadas, you can find it here. The black beans are flavored with a soffritto of (scraps from the refrigerator) red onion, shallot, green onion, cilantro stems, garlic, and mild ground Numex chile. The fish (Pacific rockfish) is baked on a sheet tray after being sprinkled with a mix of mild ground Numex chile, ground cumin, granulated garlic, salt, and aromatic Mexican oregano.

For us, tostadas are a great change of pace. And these fish and black bean ones were so delicious that they'll probably become something of a regular replacement for fish tacos.

Kitchen Basics: Making Baked Tostadas

If you have time, making tostadas at home is way more economical than buying them at the store. All it takes is two sheet trays, corn tortillas, and time. You can also make tostadas by frying the tortillas in oil (and they are crazy good), but that's not super healthy eating, is it? Baking the tostadas removes fat from the equation and yields a very good result.

Raw Tortillas on a Sheet Tray

For every two half sheet trays, you can make 8 tostadas, plenty for two people. Lay out the tortillas as you see in the photo above, with three tortillas down each side of the pan and the other two tortillas in the middle, overlapping those on the edges.

Keep the Tortillas Flat

Keep the tortillas flat during cooking by covering them with another sheet tray.

First Turn at 15 Minutes

Place in moderate oven (350F) for fifteen minutes. Remove and flip all the tortillas. This will give the water vapor a chance to evaporate and help dry the tostadas. Notice that the tortillas have shrunk to the point where there is almost no overlap.

Second Turn at 30 Minutes

Return the covered tortillas to the oven for another fifteen minutes. Then remove them and flip them once again. You'll be able to judge how dry they are at this point and make an estimate of how much longer they need to cook. I notice timing differences if I am using the bottom shelf (near the flame) or the top shelf (away from the flame). How fresh the tortillas are (how much water they contain) also influences cook time as well as how full the oven is. It takes longer if I am also cooking another tray of tostadas or something else simultaneously.

Finished and Cooling at 37-40 Minutes

Once the tortillas are done to the point where they are crisp without being burnt, pull them out and uncover them to let them finish evaporating any remaining water while they cool. Once they have cooled to room temperature, you can store them for very long periods in a tightly sealed container. Humidity is the bane of tostadas, so keep them well-sealed if you are not going to eat them in short order.

Brined Roasted Steelhead with Fennel-Orange Slaw

We end up eating a fair amount of steelhead trout and salmon, to the point where I am looking for ways to cook it other than on the grill or in a steel pan. I remember years ago at the restaurant, sometimes I would brine and roast fish and that's what I decided to do in this case. Brining gives fish a silky, sexy texture and this piece of steelhead was amazingly moist and delicious.

Brined Roasted Steelhead with Fennel-Orange Slaw

It's hard to come up with garnishes for dishes in the middle of winter because so few things are in season. Fortunately, winter is a great time for both citrus and fennel. On spying a nice fennel bulb at the market, I brought it home to make into slaw for the steelhead. Haricots verts have very good shelf life and are not too bad during winter, so I brought some of those home to roast as well.

Brining Steelhead

A decent brine is a tablespoon of Kosher salt per cup of water. For this brine, I put two tablespoons of salt and a tablespoon of sugar in a pint of water. The steelhead was in the brine for about two hours. Even ten minutes in the brine improves both texture and flavor. I did not salt the fish otherwise.

Fennel-Orange Slaw

This fennel-orange slaw could not be any simpler to make. It contains one fennel bulb, core removed and shaved, the segments of two large navel oranges, and a bit of shaved red onion. It is seasoned with salt, sugar, red wine vinegar, and the orange juice that I squeezed from the oranges after removing the segments.

Pan-Seared Barramundi with "Sauce Vièrge"

I'm a huge proponent of wild-caught local fish from well-managed fisheries, but out here in Oregon, our selection is quite limited in comparison to what I am used to on the East Coast, where we served many dozens of species at the restaurant. Out here, we have access to salmon, steelhead, rockfish, Pacific cod, albacore, sturgeon, sablefish, halibut, and not a whole lot else. Often I wish for a bit more diversity in the fish that we eat, so when I ran across some beautiful farmed barramundi, I snapped it up.

Every now and again at the restaurant, we could not get much in the way of local wild-caught fish because of a hurricane or nor'easter keeping the fleet in port. At such times, I had no choice but to buy farmed fish and farmed barramundi from Massachusetts was a great choice. It cooks (and has crowd appeal) just like any of the eastern firm white fish: striped bass, grouper, wreckfish, drum, corvina, or snapper.

Ann, who I do not believe had ever eaten barramundi, asked me to grill it, but I knew from working with the fish for many years that one of the best things about it is the crispy skin that you can get from cooking it in a steel or cast iron pan. And so I crisped the portions and served them with a sauce that I call sauce vièrge.

Pan-Seared Barramundi with "Sauce Vièrge"

"Sauce Vièrge"

When I was learning my chops in the 1980s, one of the most influential chefs was Michel Guérard, who was arguably the father of nouvelle cuisine, the more modern take-off of haute cuisine with an emphasis on lighter saucing, brighter flavors, and beautiful presentations. Chef Guérard recorded a lot of his dishes in a book called Cuisine Minceur, so-called slimming cuisine. While some of the dishes seemed to me to be a bit too austere in pursuit of diet consciousness, I did read and learn.

One of preparations for which he became well known among chefs was a sauce that he called virgin sauce, sauce vièrge, virgin in the sense of uncooked and raw. It is essentially finely chopped tomatoes in a vinaigrette. I took the sauce and adopted it to my kitchen and served it with seafood during late summer when the necessary ingredients were in the market.

My version is more or less a chopped salad meets vinaigrette. Last night's version included red pepper, yellow pepper, cucumber, tomato, minced shallot, capers, olive oil, and lemon juice. I generally include either basil or parsley, but the winter has not been kind to my parsley and of course, the basil is long dead.

So, while the execution of the sauce is all mine, I freely admit that I stole the base idea from Michel Guérard. That theft is in the chef world one of the highest forms of flattery: something that one chef does is so good that other chefs take that idea and adapt it to their kitchens. I'd like to think that one of more of my sous chefs and other cooks might have taken some of my ideas into their own kitchens.

Spaghetti Squash and Black Bean Tostadas

Spaghetti Squash and Black Bean Tostadas

The last time that I made spaghetti squash with black beans and baked it into a casserole, Ann commented that she'd really like the dish if I were to make it as a tostada topping. You can find the recipe for the topping at the link above. Last evening, I baked a spaghetti squash and made the tostadas that she asked for.

Making Tostadas

Although I see bags of tostadas flying off the shelves at the local supermarket, I don't see the point of buying them, if you have time to make them yourself. All it takes is a bag of corn tortillas, two sheet trays, an oven, and about 45 minutes. Although I lay out the process below, there is a step-by-step photo shoot of how to do it here.

To make tostadas, I lay 8 corn tortillas on a sheet tray, 3 along each side and two in the center. Then I top the sheet tray with another such that the tortillas are trapped between the two sheet trays. This will keep the tostada shells relatively flat.

The tortillas go into a moderate (350F) oven for fifteen minutes, at which point I pull them out of the oven and take the top sheet tray off. This lets the water vapor escape. Then I flip the tortillas over. At this point, you will see that they have shrunk to the point where all eight fit on the sheet tray with almost no overlap.

Re-covering the tortillas, I put them back into the oven for another 15 minutes and repeat the same process for a final 15 minutes. At this point, the tortillas should be dry and crisp. Pull them out and leave them uncovered until you are ready to eat. The hot tortillas will continue to evaporate any last bits of water in them as they cool.

You should eat the tostadas right away, but if you cannot, once they have cooled to room temperature, you can store them for a very long period in a tightly covered container. Humidity is their enemy so keep them cool and dry.

Vegetable "Lasagna"

Ann put me onto the idea of making a vegetarian lasagna a week or so ago. It was kind of a fun dish to assemble and eat. Naturally, it would have been a lot better if I weren't working so hard to minimize the fat in it, but it was delicious.

Vegetable "Lasagna"

Once I assembled the lasagna, it baked in a moderate (350F) oven for an hour to heat through and crisp the pecorino romano that I grated over the top. I filled the oiled 9x9 baking dish level with the top rim and as you can see in the photo, the lasagna puffed up about a half an inch above the rim of the dish. It later settled back as it cooled.

Baked Squash Slices for "Noodles"

I started by cutting several (let's call it 9 or 10) small zucchini and Lebanese squash (the light green, small straight squash) into 5-6 slices each and placing the slices on two sheet trays sprayed with pan spray. They went into a moderate oven (350F) with a turn every fifteen minutes for about an hour.

The point of pre-cooking them is to evaporate much of the water in the squash so that it does not bleed into the lasagna. I jammed the slices together as closely as possible until both sheet trays were full. You can see how much shrinkage there was in the oven; that's water that will not dilute the dish.

I know that Ann wanted me to use eggplant in the dish as well but it is winter now. While we have a year-round supply of decent summer squash at the store, the eggplants tend to be terrible out of season. I just want Ann to note that I have bent my rule about using out-of-season produce (the squash) to make her what she requested.

Extra Thick Marinara

To make the tomato sauce, I roughly blended two drained 28-ounce cans of diced tomatoes and then put them on the flame to reduce and thicken. To the pan, I added four cloves of garlic (minced), a tablespoon of dried basil, and a pinch of red pepper flakes. I never salt dishes that are going to be highly reduced until the end for fear of overly concentrating the salt.

When reducing tomato sauce, you really want to watch the flame so that you don't send geysers of red sauce all over the kitchen, especially as the sauce becomes thick. It took about an hour of cooking to reduce the sauce to the point you see above, with me getting up from my movie every 10 minutes to check the flame and stir the sauce.

White Bean and Pesto Purée

For the alternating layers, I decided to make a purée of white beans and pesto. I drained four 15-ounce cans of white beans and put them in the food processor with a tablespoon and a half of pesto. It took several minutes for the food processor to convert the very dry beans to a smooth but stiff purée. I seasoned it to taste with salt.

Then came the assembly: a thin layer of marinara, a layer of squash, a layer of beans, a layer of squash, a layer of marinara, a layer of squash, a layer of beans, a layer of marinara, and a grating of pecorino romano.

This was a fun dish for a lazy and cold winter Sunday afternoon.