The Almost Perfect Dinner and The Perfect Dessert

I have been cooking and baking with an active interest in it for a few years now. While I still consider myself a novice in the kitchen I do think that there are some basic dishes that I should have made by now. Now in the past year I have made some progress by making lots of firsts for me such as a tiered cake, fruit cobbler, lasagna, pot roast…. However, there are still several dishes out there that I think are classic dishes that I surely should have made by now. One such dish is chicken pot pie. I have never made it and while I have found several recipes for it that looked tasty I have simply passed them by. Well, that changed tonight as I decided to finally cross chicken pot pie off my list by giving Ina Garten’s Chicken Stew with Biscuits (her version of chicken pot pie) a go.

I will start out by saying that this is a very time consuming dish to make. It is an enjoyable one to make, but be sure you have plenty of time set aside for it. I started by roasting the chicken. This is not the first time I have followed Ina’s method of roasting chicken breasts and they always turns out perfect – moist and flavorful! It is very simple to do and yields great results, so even if you don’t make the rest of this recipe try roasting chicken breasts (on the bone with skin) like Ina. While the chicken roasted I chopped all the veggies and parsley (including celery and red potatoes which were my addition). I also put the chicken broth and bouillon cubes in a pot and let them heat up. You then blanch the carrots in one pot and sauté the onions and celery in a little butter in a dutch oven. Once the onions are translucent you add the flour in while stirring. Then you add the broth, cream (I used half and half), veggies and chicken and mix it all together. The chicken stew then goes in a baking dish and bakes for about 15 minutes uncovered. While it is baking you make the biscuits by combining the dry ingredients and then working the butter into them. Then you add the half and half and parsley and work it all together. The dough gets rolled out and cut into somewhat thin biscuits. The biscuits are then added to the top of the stew and brushed with an egg wash. The whole dish goes back in the oven for about 20 more minutes.

Russ, Allen, and I all enjoyed the chicken stew with biscuits. The flavor of the stew was excellent and the biscuits were the perfect topping. The stew was thick and creamy and the biscuits added great texture. The only problem was that the carrots should have blanched for longer and I should have blanched the potatoes too. We all thought the potatoes were a good addition they just weren’t cooked through. I even thought about pre-cooking the potatoes and then didn’t do it… Next time I’ll make sure that the carrots and potatoes are almost completely cooked through when I add them to the stew. Despite the crunchy vegetables Russ rates it a 9.

Now, since it was Saturday night and we were in Mentone I couldn’t make a hearty, comfort food dish for dinner and then not serve dessert… so I took the opportunity to try a recipe I saw on Smitten Kitchen for Oatmeal, Chocolate Chip Cookies. These are a fairly straight forward cookie recipe with one small twist that takes these cookies from good to over the top amazing! You add a little orange zest to the cookie dough and it really just makes these cookies fantastic. The cookies are not too crunchy or too chewy and have a great balance of oatmeal and chocolate chips. Smitten Kitchen also adds chopped nuts to hers, but since Russ doesn’t like nuts in cookies I left them out. I really think this could be a look no further this is it perfect recipe for Oatmeal, Chocolate Chip Cookies. Since Russ did the shopping and bought the largest bag of chocolate chips I have ever seen and since the holidays are coming up I may be making another batch of these sometime soon. Russ rates the cookies a 10!