First-Ever Chicken Pot Pie

Plus: Dried Cherries in Chicken Salad and Cookies, Leah Koenig at Untable, and Slots Still Available for Puglia.

Hey everyone,

Before I tell you about my first-ever chicken pot pie, I’m excited to say there are STILL SLOTS AVAILABLE FOR MY TRIP TO ITALY THIS OCTOBER:

Don’t miss the opportunity to travel with me to Puglia this October 13th through the 19th. We’ll have so much fun together and eat ourselves silly. Click this button to get more information before the whole thing sells out! It’ll be the trip of a lifetime.

Now, on to the topic at hand: chicken pot pie.

Why have I never made it? Where has it been my whole life?

I guess it always felt very Stoffer’s adjacent, the kind of thing that you eat at a card table in front of a TV while watching old episodes of Hollywood Squares on VHS. But chicken pot pie doesn’t have to be a sad, frozen affair. Made fresh, it’s like a cozy bowl of thick chicken soup combined with a flaky biscuit. Here’s a video I made of my process:

@amateurgourmetFirst-ever chicken pot pie. 🥧 #chickenpotpie #cozy #comfortfood #recipe #food #foodtiktok

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I loved Smitten Kitchen’s recipe for the dough — sour cream and cider vinegar in there? Genius. (Adding parsley was my own idea, which I think made it very pretty, imo.) As for the filling, I liked the simplicity of Pioneer Woman’s technique. Just onions, carrots, celery in butter, some flour, white wine, chicken stock, and then cream. Instead of thyme, I added lots of parsley and chopped celery leaf.

Honestly, this was such a cozy dinner and a fun thing to do. I think I enjoyed making them as much as I enjoyed eating them.

What’s your favorite chicken pot pie recipe? Sound off in the comments.

Part of the reason that I made chicken pot pie, is we had so much leftover chicken from the spatchcocked chicken that I made for Cousin David and his husband Omar last week. Enough to also make a chicken salad, this one with mayo, mustard, celery, and — most significant of all — dried cherries:

If you’ve never put dried cherries in your chicken salad, it’s a game changer. They add tartness, sweetness, and dare I say it… depth.

I had the dried cherries around because I made oatmeal dried cherry cookies that I made a video about here:

@amateurgourmetOatmeal cherry cookies. 🍒 #baking #bake #cookies #dessert #food #foodie #foodblogger #foodtiktok

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These were so good and I froze half of the cookies (as raw dough balls) and baked them off last night. These are just nice to have around for breakfast, for lunch, what have you.

Finally, I met up with Leah Koenig on Tuesday for lunch at Untable in Carroll Gardens. Leah’s newsletter, A Jewish Table, is a delight, as are her cookbooks (especially her latest one, Portico).

Lunch at Untable is such a great deal. This is a restaurant that was on all of the top ten lists this year (we went for dinner once and loved it) and their lunch deal is basically $15 for one of four items: Pad Thai, a pork curry, a vegetable curry, and one more thing that I forget.

Leah had the vegetable curry which was bright red and I had the pork curry which was a vivid green and also came with eggplant.

The flavor was explosive. I tasted lemongrass and maybe lime leaf? But also so much chili. My eyes were watering and when I went to the bathroom to blow my nose after, I felt like a ray of light broke through my sinuses and I breathed more clearly than I ever have in my life.

Definitely going back to Untable for lunch. What a bargain.

Now for some links:

• Court Street Bagels closes then reopens (this is right near me; Eater NY);

• The Essential Alice Munro (not food, but I’ve always wanted to read more Alice Munro; NYT);

• Horses Wakes Up from a Very Bad Dream (stopped going to Horses when I heard the owner killed cats; here’s an update on Taste).

That’s all for this week folks!

Don’t forget to click the Italy thing. I’d love to meet you in real life!

Your pal,

Adam