chicken pot pie: a food narrative

It seems all of my post-wedding posts are destined to be about cooking or reading.

I have quite a few friends who share my love of cooking. These friends also tend to love talking about cooking. My friend, Laurie, who is not an avid cook, often laments the conversational turns that occur when two or more of her culinary-enthusiast friends get together. She is not fond of what she calls "the food narrative," especially when it goes on and on through recipe comparisons and tales of dinners gone wrong and mild bragging about confections made perfectly. She would probably not enjoy this post.

A few months ago, my sister told me about a cooking experiment she had conducted. She started with our grandmother's chicken and dumplings recipe. She added a few ingredients: peas, carrots, and onions. She topped it with canned biscuits and baked until they were golden brown. The result was similar to chicken pot pie.

I experimented with her accidental recipe. I made a few pots of something we christened "chicken pot pie soup." I thought this was as close as I might ever come to making actual chicken pot pie, which seemed to me such a complicated dish.

Then I consulted my favorite cookbook, Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, and I learned how to make honest-to-goodness chicken pot pie. I made it thick; I made it soupy. I seasoned it with sage; I seasoned it with thyme. I made it with a biscuit topping; I made it with the traditional savory tart topping. Most importantly, I learned that, despite seeming complex and time consuming, chicken pot pie can be incredibly easy because both the filling and the crust can be made a day ahead and stored in the fridge.

After a few attempts, I finally deemed the pot pie good enough to cook for other people.Last night I served it to some friends. It was our first post-wedding-day entertaining experience. (Thanks Mindy, Michael, and Dashiell, for a wonderful evening!)

This recipe is definitely becoming a go-to meal for us. Now that I'm comfortable with the basic recipe, I'm beginning to think about variations: a meat other than chicken? A vegetarian version?  Different vegetables with the chicken?

I once had a vegetarian pot pie made with sweet potatoes, butternut squash, and cheddar cheese. It was delicious. I wonder if I could duplicate it. I've read suggestions to use everything from green beans to rutabagas with the chicken. I don't think I've ever cooked a rutabaga!

The thought of cooking a rutabaga (or any other unfamiliar food item) makes me think of scenes from the movie Julie and Julia. As she works her way through Julia Child's cookbook, Julie more than once expresses her anxiety about preparing pate de canard en croute, boned stuffed duck in a pastry crust. The obstacle, as she explains, is that she first has to bone a duck.

I love the scene where Julie has placed the duck on her coffee table. She hovers over it with a boning knife while watching a video recording of Julia Child explaining how to bone a duck.

I can easily picture myself sitting at my desk--mouse in one hand, rutabaga in the other--watching YouTube videos that explain how to peel and prepare this unfamiliar vegetable.