Tag Archives: pie

Dinner

Chicken and leek pot pies

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Between the pastry, the cream, and the bacon, chicken pie was always going to be a pretty good high-fat meal for L. My only question was how I could manage to make a lighter version. With individual pot pies, on the other hand, it’s easy to add in extra goodies to just some of the pies to increase the fat content. I used scraps of leftover pastry to mark the pies with ‘T’ and ‘L’ so they wouldn’t get mixed up.

This was also my first attempt at making puff pastry, which is something I would have never tried without my new Thermomix. I think I over-processed it and it didn’t rise as well as it should, but it was tasty and I will be trying it again.

For something a little lighter, you can skip the pastry and serve some of the chicken mixture with pasta or a baked potato.

Ingredients

  • 1 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 leek, finely sliced
  • 450g chicken thigh, trimmed and cut into bite-sized pieces.
  • 200g button mushrooms, quartered
  • 1 cup chicken stock
  • 1 tbsp thyme
  • 1 rasher of bacon, cut into 1cm square pieces
  • 1/2 cup cream
  • 1 tbsp plain flour
  • 1 sheet puff pastry (I made mine in the Thermomix, following the recipe from the Everyday Cookbook)
  • 1 egg, beaten
  1. Fry leek in olive oil on a low heat until it has softened and started to brown. This should take about ten minutes.
  2. Turn up the heat and add chicken, mushrooms, stock and thyme. Simmer for 20 minutes.
  3. In the meantime, fry the bacon in a separate frypan until cooked but not crispy.
  4. Add 1/4 cup of cream and the flour and simmer until the mixture reduces.
  5. Preheat the oven to 200C
  6. Spoon some of the mixture into two 1-cup ramekins (or three smaller ramekins). This should be about half the mixture. Make sure the mixture has not filled past the top of the ramekins.
  7. Add the remaining cream and the bacon to the remaining chicken mixture. Mix together well, and then divide between the remaining ramekins.
  8. Roll out the puff pastry and cut out circles in the size of the ramekins. Cover each ramekin with a circle of puff pastry, then use the scrap pastry to mark out which pies have the extra cream and bacon. Brush each with egg.
  9. Bake for 20 minutes or until pastry is golden.
  10. Serve with peas or a green salad.