Personal Pot Pie

We love a good pot pie, but there is often not enough crust to suit our tastes.  I have thought, from time to time, about getting individual pie pans, but really, I hate having my shelves cluttered up with so many seldomly used implements.  In my quest for individual pies, I discovered something most people already have in their tool cache.  Muffin tins.  Yep, a large muffin tin is the perfect pot pie pan!  Now, our pot pies come in a convenient personal size, with no new pans needed.

Typically, I use whatever I have on hand to make a pot pie.  This time, I grabbed a jar of canned chicken meat, added some celery, green onions, and cubed, cooked potatoes.  I make the sauce just like I make gravy and white sauce.  First, I melt a cube of butter in a skillet, add meat, celery and onion and cook until the vegetables are soft.  Then I sprinkle a generous amount of flour over the meat mixture.  After stirring and cooking for a few minutes, I add milk and chicken bouillon.  I continue cooking and stirring until the milk becomes a saucy gravy.  I add diced, cooked, potatoes and salt and pepper (to taste) and the chicken pot pie filling is ready!

Mixing the meat in butter

Adding vegetables in with the meat and white sauce

The crust recipe is a favorite of mine from Karey Swan's "Hearth & Home" cookbook.  It is actually a Pasty crust recipe, but we have used it from everything from pastys and pot pies to fried apple pies.  It is extraordinarily easy to make and oh, so easy to deal with.

Pot Pie/Pasty/Fried Apple Pie Pastry
1 cup butter (or lard)
1 1/4 cups boiling water
1 tsp. salt
4 1/2 - 5 cups white or whole wheat flour

Cut up the butter into a bowl and add the boiling water, stirring until melted.  Stir in the salt and flour till the dough forms a ball.  Use the dough immediately or chill until needed.  Divide dough into 8 (very large) or 16 (smaller) pieces.  Roll dough into circles and fill as desired.

Add filling to pastry round

Folding the top crust

Ready to go into the oven

For the pot pie, I just rolled the pastry into circles (I used two pans, so we divided the dough into 12 pieces) and placed each circle into a muffin tin.  I then filled the circle of dough with pot pie filling and folded the extra dough over the top of the filling.  Bake the pot pies for 40 minutes at 350 degrees, or until the pastry is nicely browned.  Simple!

Dinner is served!

These pot pies can be easily adapted for your preparedness pantry by substituting stored foods.  Lard can be substituted for the butter in the pastry, the other ingredients are all pantry items.  Canned chicken can be used instead of fresh, bacon grease or lard can be used instead of butter in the white sauce.  Dehydrated vegetables (potatoes, celery, onions or even peppers and broccoli) would be a very nice substitution for the fresh veggies we used.  These cook up quite well in the wood cookstove, however, if you are cooking over an open fire, it would be a very simple thing to line a dutch oven with the pastry crust, fill with pot pie filling and cook over coals (with a lid covered in coals, of course).

Chicken pot pies are a wonderful treat, but the same basic recipe could be used for any number of pies, whether they are beef, turkey, venison, elk - whatever you happen to have on hand.  These are filling, hearty and eminently tasty.