chicken pot pie casserole with homemade biscuit topping

Chicken Pot Pie Casserole with Buttermilk Biscuit Topping
(recipe from The Messy Baker Blog)

for the pot pie:
1 lb. split chicken breasts
4 tbs. olive oil
3 stalks celery, diced
3 carrots, diced
1 onion, diced
1 large potato, peeled and diced
2 bay leaves
4 tbs. butter
½ cup flour
1 cup chicken stock
1 tsp. worcestershire sauce
1 tsp. Bon Appetit seasoning
1 cup frozen corn
1 cup frozen peas
2 tsp. chopped fresh thyme
salt & pepper

milk mixture:
4 cups milk
3 sprigs thyme
1 sprig rosemary
1 sprig sage
1 head garlic, cut in half


buttermilk biscuits:
2½ cups all-purpose flour
2½ tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. kosher salt
1 tbs. sugar
½ cup very cold butter, cut into pieces
¾ cup cold buttermilk
1 large egg, lightly beaten

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter a large casserole dish.
In a large saucepan over medium-low heat, add milk, thyme, rosemary, sage, and garlic. Bring to a simmer and cook for 15 minutes (do not let the mixture come to a boil). Strain.

While the milk is simmering, heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large pot over medium-high heat. Season your chicken with salt and pepper. Add the chicken to the pot and brown on each side for 2-3 minutes until golden brown. Transfer the chicken to a sheet pan and finish cooking in the oven, about 15 minutes. When the chicken is finished, transfer to a cutting board and allow to cool before shredding. Turn the oven temperature up to 400 degrees.
Turn the heat down to medium-low and and add 2 tablespoons of olive oil to the chicken drippings. Add celery, carrots, onion, potato, and bay leaves. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cook the vegetables, stirring occasionally, until tender, about 15 minutes.
Remove the bay leaves and add the butter. Once the butter has melted, add the flour to create a roux; cook for 1-2 minutes.
Stir in the strained milk, stirring until smooth. Add chicken stock, Bon Appetit seasoning, worcestershire sauce, and a pinch of salt and pepper. Allow the mixture to come to a gentle simmer and thicken. If the mixture gets too thick, stir in some more chicken stock.
Once the mixture thickens, add the frozen peas, corn, shredded chicken and chopped thyme. Taste the mixture to see if it needs more salt and pepper.

for the biscuits:
In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar.
Cut the butter into the dry ingredients, either using a fork or a pastry cutter, until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add the buttermilk and egg and stir until just combined.
Transfer the mixture to a lightly floured surface and gently knead until the dough comes together, making sure not to over work the dough.
Roll out the dough to about a ½-inch thick. Cut out biscuits with a round biscuit cutter.
Place the biscuits directly on top of the chicken mixture, spacing them 1-inch apart. Place the dish in the oven and bake 20-25 minutes, or until the biscuits are golden brown and the casserole is bubbly.

Homemade Potstickers and Dipping Sauce

I love Asian food and dumplings of all kinds are definitely in my top five favorite Asian foods. Wontons, dumplings, gyoza— I love them all. Only when I was taking this photo of the ones I made did I realize how weird they must look to people who've never heard of them before. They're so delicious but at the same time look like slimy little skin bags. Now that I've said that, you're probably never going to look at potstickers the same. Sorry.

I used to get the potstickers from the frozen section of the grocery store to snack on, and for a while it was a staple every time I'd have friends over, no matter whose house we went to. All of us had them on hand at all times. I had never made them from scratch and while it seemed like an extremely difficult process, I looked up a few recipes and realized it wasn't as daunting as it sounded. This recipe yielded about 50-60 potstickers, of which I made 20 and froze the rest. 

Pork Potstickers/Chinese Dumplings

• 1/2 pound ground pork
• 2 leaves napa cabbage (finely cut)
• 1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
• 1 teaspoon rice wine vinegar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 inches ginger (grated)
• 1 carrot, peeled and diced
• 2 chives, diced
• 1 pack potsticker skins (choose the thickest brand or make your own)
• Oil for pan-frying
• 1/2 cup water

Combine the ground pork, chopped napa cabbage, ginger, carrot, leeks and seasonings together. Set aside.
Place a small spoonful of the filling in the center of the potsticker skin. Dab a little water with your finger and circle around the edge of the skin, and then fold and pleat the potsticker accordingly. Repeat until filling is gone or all skins have been filled. (Here's a video / guide for folding/pleating potstickers)

To pan fry the potstickers, coat a frying pan with a little cooking oil and turn to medium heat. Place the dumplings on the frying pan and then turn the heat to high. Pan fry the potstickers until the bottoms turn golden brown and crisp. Add the water and cover the frying pan with its lid immediately. Cook until water has evaporated and turn the heat to low. Cook the potstickers for another 2 minutes or so, dish out and serve hot with dipping sauce.


Simple Dipping Sauce

• 4 Tbsp soy sauce
• 2 pinches brown sugar
• a dab of sesame oil
• a few drops rice wine vinegar
• 2 drops sriracha (depends on how spicy you like it)

Combine all ingredients in a bowl / serving dish. Stir until brown sugar has dissolved.Garnish with sesame seeds or chives. Serve with potstickers.

Homemade Chicken Soup

I've been really into making soups and stews lately, probably because I was sick for a while and it's finally getting colder out. After making my own chicken soup from scratch and realizing how easy it is, I am never going back to anything else. Growing up on Campbell's soup and finally making the same thing but having it taste at least 10x better is always a great feeling.


Homemade Chicken Soup
(slightly adapted from Behind The Skillet)

• 5 cups chicken broth or stock
• 1 cup water
• 1 large onion, coarsely chopped
• 2 carrots, peeled and chopped
• 2 stalks celery, chopped
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley (I used about 1 1/2 Tbsp dried parsley)
• 2 large cloves garlic, peeled and crushed (or 1 Tbsp pre-diced garlic)
• 1 cup pulled/shredded Chicken breast
• 1 Tbs olive oil 
• 1/2 cup finely diced carrot (about 1 carrot)
• 1/2 cup finely diced leek (about 1 small leek)
• 1/2 tsp dried thyme
• 2 to 2 1/2 cups cooked pasta (I used linguine broken into fourths, but you can use whatever you want)
• salt
• pepper

Place the Broth, water, onion, 2 carrots, celery root, parsley and garlic in soup pot. Season with salt if needed (it really just depends on your broth). Cover and bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium and simmer for around 30 or 40 minutes.
Drain through a fine sieve and/or cheesecloth (reserving broth and straining out all the veggies and sediment). Place the pulled chicken in the broth and cover and set aside.

In your soup pot, heat olive oil then add the diced carrot and leek, thyme and pinch or so of black pepper. Saute for around 10 minutes or until the veggies get nice and soft and leeks are just starting to brown/caramelize.

Add half of the broth, cover and gently simmer for around 10 minutes. Add the rest of the stock, pulled chicken and cooked pasta. Taste and season with salt and pepper as necessary, then gently simmer for a few more minutes (don't let it cook too long, or sit for a long time after cooking, as the pasta tends to just soak up all that broth).

Beef Stew

Every time I make something I've never made before (especially if it's a food I'm not used to eating, never mind cooking), I'm incredibly worried it won't come out perfectly, but somehow I manage it (most of the time).
All the recipes for beef stew I looked up needed red wine or tomatoes/tomato paste, both of which I did not have. Being underage I couldn't just go buy some wine, but I don't recall my parents ever making their beef stew with wine anyway. They weren't big wine drinkers. So I adapted this recipe to fit what I had in the kitchen, as usual. I unfortunately had no bay leaves so I used a bunch of fresh sage leaves as a substitute, though I would recommend the bay leaves if you have them.

• 1 eye round roast, cut into 1″ chunks
• 1/4 cup of flour
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 1 large onion, diced
• 2 large carrots, diced
• 2 stalks of celery, diced
• 3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped (or 2 Tbsp pre-chopped garlic)
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 tbsp thyme
• 2 1/2 cups of beef broth
• 3 Tbsp tomato sauce
• 4 potatoes, diced

First, brown the meat. Coat the chunks of roast in the flour, and heat the olive oil in the bottom of a large pan. You might have to brown the chunks in batches, because you don't want to overcrowd the pot. After all of the meat is browned, remove it and set it aside. You’ll be left with a lot of gunk on the bottom of your pan. That's what makes the stew taste so good.
Add the carrots/celery/onion/garlic on top of this, along with the bay leaf, thyme, and a pinch of salt. When the onions are transparent, add your meat back to the pot along with your broth and tomato sauce.
Use a wooden spatula or whisk and scrape the bottom of the pan to release all of the brown bits.
Cover, and cook on medium/low for about 1 hour, stirring occasionally (and gently scraping the bottom to make sure nothing burns). After the hour has gone by, add the potatoes, and cook for an additional 35 mins.

Chicken & Dumplings

Chicken and dumplings is one of my absolute favorite meals. Especially because it's like chicken pot pie without the pie crust (and if you know me, you know I'm not a huge fan of pie crust unless it's made from cookies or graham crackers). Plus it's super easy to make, warms you up on cold days, and you almost always have all the ingredients in your pantry.

I had a rotisserie chicken I needed to get rid of and I'd never actually made it myself before, but I thought it tasted pretty delicious, so I'd call it a success.

It should be noted that I used a combination of a recipe found online (via Feast Ur Eyes) and my knowledge of watching my father make this on occasion to write up this exact recipe. Coincidentally, I didn't have some of the ingredients so I improvised. Here are my changes:

• no celery or peas
• 4 sage leaves instead of bay leaves
• shredded rotisserie chicken instead of making my own
• one carrot because it was absolutely enormous

but if you do have the correct ingredients, either way is fine, obviously (also, if you don't have heavy cream, you can just use milk, whipping cream, light cream, etc). I don't have any pans with lids, nor do I own a dutch oven, so I used the deepest pan we had and used my cutting board as a lid, which worked fine, except I should have added more broth. The dumplings sucked so much of the broth up while cooking that there wasn't very much left and a lot of chicken ended up stuck to the bottom of the pan.

The dumplings turned out HUGE, but that's what I get for eyeballing the size and trying to fit all of them into my tiny, too shallow pan.

Chicken & Dumplings

• 1/2 onion, chopped
• 2 carrots, diced
• 2 stalks celery, diced
• 1/4 tsp thyme
• salt
• pepper
• 2 bay leaves
• 4 cups chicken broth (1 cup reserved)
• 1/4 cup all purpose flour
• 1 cup frozen peas, thawed
• 2 cups cooked chicken, shredded 

For the dumplings:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/3 cups heavy cream
• 1 Tbsp dried parsley (can be substituted with rosemary, thyme, basil, etc)

Heat 1 Tbsp olive oil in large dutch oven (or a deep pan with a lid) over medium heat. Sauté onion until softened, about 2 minutes. Add carrots, celery, salt, pepper, thyme, and bay leaves. Sauté until vegetables are softened, about 5 minutes. Add 3 cups chicken broth, scraping any brown bits off the bottom of the pan. Add in most of the chicken and the peas. In a separate bowl, heat 1 cup chicken stock and slowly whisk in 1/4 cup flour (use a sieve to pour mixture into the soup if it is lumpy). Bring soup up to a boil and reduce to simmer, uncovered, about 10 minutes, or until broth is thickened. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Stir flour, baking powder, parsley, and salt in large bowl. Stir in cream until incorporated (dough will be very thick).

Discard bay leaves and return stew to rapid simmer. Add reserved chicken to stew along with any accumulated juices. Using 2 large soup spoons, a small ice cream scoop, or your hands, drop golf ball-sized dumplings onto stew about 1/4 inch apart (you should have 16 to 18 dumplings). Reduce heat to low, cover, and cook until dumplings have doubled in size (or until a toothpick inserted into them comes out clean), 15 to 18 minutes. Serve.

Cap'n Crunch Chicken Fingers and Bacon Green Beans

I have always been a cereal fanatic. I love it so much, I don't just eat it for breakfast. Sometimes when I was younger I would eat it for every meal of the day. That doesn't happen so much anymore, but I do eat it frequently. Sometimes I eat it as a snack between meals instead of a meal. I eat it without milk. When I was younger, I was definitely most enthusiastic about the super sugary cereals (Cap'n Crunch and Cocoa Pebbles being my favorites). Now I've learned to like "healthier" cereals (especially Honey Bunches of Oats), but I do still enjoy the occasional sugar-overdose.

I believe I first heard of using Cap'n Crunch as a coating/batter for chicken on the Food Network ages ago. I somehow convinced my mother to make it, she hated it, we never had it again. I remember it being delicious but I think it was too sweet for my parents.
We had some chicken breasts I had frozen earlier in the week because I was afraid of them going bad so I decided to thaw them and that I would try to make the recipe again to see if I still liked it.

I didn't really think of a side-dish to go with the chicken until I had already put them in the oven. We had some green beans left and the tiny bit of bacon in the fridge was looking very sad, so I made a recipe my Grammy used to make. My dad's side of the family traveled around a lot, but they lived in the south a lot (my father was born in Virginia, they lived in Texas for I don't know how long, and eventually moved to New England sometime before my father and uncles were in high school). What I've learned from certain family recipes is this: everything is better with bacon and almost everything in southern cooking has bacon (or some other meat) to help flavor it. This is pretty much law and I have no problem with it.

Cap'n Crunch Chicken Fingers (recipe adapted from Breakroom Test Kitchen)

• 3 cups Cap’n Crunch cereal, crushed
• 1/2 cup corn meal (or crushed corn flakes)
• 2 lbs chicken tenders (or chicken breasts cut into tenders)
• 1 egg
• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup flour
• 1 tsp paprika
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 1/2 tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 375°F.

Combine the crushed cereals (or cereal and corn meal) in one bowl. Combine the egg and milk in another bowl. Combine the flour, paprika powder, garlic powder, salt and pepper in another bowl. Dip the chicken tenders into the dry mix, then into the egg mix, and then coat with the cereal crumbs. Arrange tenders on a baking sheet lined with aluminium foil and sprayed with cooking spray. Bake for 20-25 minutes, flipping the tenders over halfway before they're done if you want them to be extra crispy. if you aren't sure they're done, just take a knife and cut one in half: when the juices run clear, the chicken is done.

Bacon Green Beans

• about 4 strips bacon, cut into about 1" pieces
• green beans (not sure how many I used but for larger amounts, just adjust the amount of bacon)
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 1 tsp ground black pepper

Clean and cut your beans. Put some water on the stove to boil. When water is boiling, drop your green beans in for about 10 minutes or until you can pierce them easily with a fork (if you like your beans mushier, leave them in longer and skip the next part). To keep beans crisp, after draining them, dunk them in a bath of ice water for about 30 seconds. 

While your beans are boiling, grab a skillet and cook your bacon over medium heat. After the bacon is done, get rid of most of the bacon grease (but not all— leave maybe 1 tbsp. I know it sounds weird and unhealthy, and it probably is, but trust me, it's delicious)When the beans are done, place them in the skillet with the bacon and flip the beans until the bacon is incorporated and they are coated. Add salt and pepper to taste, tossing again to make sure the beans get coated.

Grammy's Refrigerator Pickles

This is a recipe that’s been in the family for I don’t know how long, but I remember eating these pickles ever since I was really little. My grandmother on my dad’s side used to make them all the time, but now mostly just my dad (and sometimes my aunt) makes them. I realized recently I didn’t actually know the recipe and couldn’t make them myself, so when I saw my dad this weekend I asked him not only to make some, but to tell me the recipe so I could keep the tradition going for as long as possible.

Grammy’s Refrigerator Pickles

• 1 cup distilled white vinegar
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 2 cups white sugar
• 6 cups sliced cucumbers
• 1 cup sliced onions
• 1 cup sliced green bell peppers
• 1 tablespoon pickling spice
• 1 teaspoon celery seed

In a medium saucepan over medium heat, bring vinegar, salt and sugar to a boil. Boil until the sugar has dissolved, about 10 minutes.
Place the cucumbers, onions and green bell peppers in a large bowl. Pour the vinegar mixture over the vegetables. Transfer to sterile containers and store in the refrigerator.

Oven Baked Sweet Potato Fries

I think sweet potato fries might be my favorite food. We rarely ever get sweet potatoes, but I jump at the chance to make these any time we do have them in the house.

Oven Baked Sweet Potato Fries

• 2 large sweet potatoes
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar 
• 1 teaspoon Kosher salt (plus more to taste, if needed)
• 1/2 teaspoon ground pepper

Preheat your oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.
Peel sweet potatoes and cut in half lengthwise,Lay each half flat, and then cut the sweet potatoes into wedges, about 1/4-inch thick. If the wedges are too wide, cut them in half (they should only be about a 1/2-inch wide. The length is unimportant.
Soak peeled and cut potatoes in a bowl of cold water for about ten minutes (the longer you soak them, the crispier the outsides will turn out).
After you’re done soaking the potatoes, pat them dry with a paper towel, then lay them out on a sheet pan. Drizzle the oil over the potato wedges, flipping them over to lightly coat each wedge.
Sprinkle the brown sugar over all of the potatoes on both sides, followed by the salt, and then the pepper. Make sure you get both sides! Bake potatoes in the oven for 30 minutes, turning them over at the 15 minute mark.