Tarragon Chicken-in-a-Pot Pies

I have been on a carb freak out this last week or ten days. I cannot put enough bread and bread-like substances into my body. I made some whole wheat English muffins a few days ago? Big mistake. They were fucking delicious and I made 12 of them and they were gone in 3 days. You would think that woulda slaked mine thirst for bread, but alas, it did not even. One of my very, very favorite options for putting bread in my body is the much revered Bread Bowl. I can’t get enough of a Bread Bowl. The prob with a bread bowl, other than that the carbs contained within are proximate to lethal, is that a Bread Bowl goes best with a hot and creamy soup. Brothy soups just don’t work well in a bread bowl. Cream-based soups are fantastic and wonderful and everybody loves them, but if I am already going down the path of moderate self destruction by introducing an entire bowl made of bread into my person, I can’t be fillin it up with heavy cream. I mean, I can, I just, I can’t. This little dish is a fairly decent compromise. I get some lean protein and some veg and some fat free milk, and my reward is an entire edible bowl of bread that I can rip apart with my talons like a bird of prey and also eat a large portion of my sig. other’s breadbowl because it was “too much bread” for him. As if such a thing exists.

Don't worry, I've had plenty of practice with monkeys.

The thing about a bread bowl also, is that it can be difficult to locate out in the wild. Some bakeries will have them. Some grocery stores will actually carry the precise 4.5 ounce country or peasant rolls that this recipe originally calls for. 4.5, my ass. If you are really in it to win it, you will go to the weird soup station in your grocery store – the one where you can purchase any number of bland and boring pre-made soups with enough sodium content to brine an entire hog. Soups either boxed up and ready to go, or hot in a deep cauldron of murky sneezes, in case you have to have your gross hot soup right the hell then and there. Find that place, and you will also find the Bread Bowls. A whopping 6 ounces of tangy sourdough, lovingly wrapped with a golden twist tie, because this a special occasion of destruction and everybody wants to look nice.

At least these vegetables won't burden you with medical bills.

Also, a note about tarragon – I fucking hate it. I have made this recipe 3 times now and the clearest self-knowledge I have discovered is that I cannot stand the flavor of tarragon on its own. I am quite surprised by this. I love black jelly beans. I love fennel (in the right context of other foods). I love anise flavored liquors (if I am already drunk and doing shots with people I knew in high school). Why wouldn’t I love tarragon, which is the very embodiment of that weird licorice flave? The answer is: I don’t know but I just don’t. So, after three tries at this puppy, I have figured out that if I use half the tarragon that the recipe calls for (which by the by is another from the Cooking Light – Best of Everyday Favorites), and cut it with some plain ol’ dried Italian Seasoning, I am not totally pissed off at the outcome. But the tarragon alone is too much, and the original amount is too much. If for some reason you wake up every day for the express purpose of finding an excuse to cook with tarragon, then double the amount I list, and leave off the Italian Seasoning. If you are a normal human bean, then do like I do. Not always, just this one time.

So please enjoy this super easy recipe and the freaking Bread Bowl in which it comes. Also, feel free to be a little more expressive in your veggies. Mushrooms, green beans, celery, peas, even crazy ol’ fennel would be excellent additions or substitutions to the carrots and zukes I use. Go crazy. I believe in you.

There's a pretty rad Where's Waldo in this pic.

One more thing. I tried to use this blog to remake an earlier recipe and I decided that, although hilarious and full of awesome pictures, it's not that user friendly as a recipe guide. I constantly scrolled back and forth between the walkthru and the ingredients. Now, I'm going to include the measurements in the body of the walk-thru. Hopefully this will make this blog an actual tool for cooking and not just a self-congratulatory and/or self-deprecating Malkovich door into my kitchen doings.


Shizz Besides the Basics:
You might need superstrength to help you refrain from drinking all the wine before you have to cook with it. Other than that, your basic kitchen utensils should serve you well in this endeavor.


Ingredients (for two):
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

½ cup fat free milk

¼ cup fat-free, less-sodium chicken broth

¼ cup dry white wine (a good rule of thumb about cooking with wines: don’t cook with wine you wouldn’t drink. If you have a fave pinot grigio or a sauv blanc or a whatev, use it. Perhaps stay away from the Thunderbird or Boones Farm)

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 skinny pat of butter

~ ½ cup chopped sweet onion

1 giant-ass boneless, skinless chicken breast (close to a pound), cut into bite-sized pieces

~ ½ cup sliced carrot (about 2 skinny ones, peeled)

~ ½ cup zucchini (approx. 3/4ths a medium zuke), sliced into ¼” half-moons

½ teaspoon salt, divided

½ teaspoon black pepper

1/8 teaspoon dried tarragon

½ teaspoon Italian Seasoning

2 (4.5 – 6 oz) country or peasant rolls, or marfarkin’ bread bowls


Order of Operations:
1. Preheat oven to 350. This is for toasting up ya bread bowls later in the game.
 

Let's all get fairly dissolved.

2. Place flour (1 Tbsp.) in a small bowl; slowly add milk (1/2 C.), stirring it up with a whisk to form a “slurry.” Make sure you get it fairly dissolved and un-lumpy. Add your chicken broth (1/4 C.) and wine (1/4 C.) to slurry, mixing well.




 
3. Get your large saucepan or high-sided frying pan out and put it over a medium flame to pre-heat.

Arise, Chicken Ziggurat!

4. Whilst our pan heats up, get your designated meat cutting board out and go to work on your chicken bress. You will want to remove any big fatty deposits and weird skin membranes or those sorta bloodclot looking things where the bone used to be. Then just cut it up into squares that will fit on your fork. Season up your chicken lumps with half of your salt (1/4 tsp.) and a couple of twists on the old pepper mill.


 5. Once your pan be hot, add your tablespoon of olive oil and your lil skinny pat of butter. The combo of these fats is what helps ya chicken brown up real nice (my chickens in the final pics is a little pasty because I totally spaced the butter pat. Oh Well).

All three of these things can make a grown man cry.

6. While your fats melt in the pan, slice up your onion until you have mostly half a cup of slightly larger than normal onion chops. This last round of onions I bought are particularly small and I used about half an onion. The other half didn’t mind at all.




7. Oil is hot, chicken is cubed and seasoned, and onion is chopped. Time for onion and chicken to get into the pan. I like for my chickens to not touch. I like a nice browned char and that suffers if you reduce your chickens’ surface area by making them touch other chickens. The onions can just go willy nilly wherevs.

Hands lookin like da dark side of Edward James Olmos.

 8. Sauté for approx 2 mins, then flip all the chickens over so their tans are even. This is a particularly boring and risky adventure since it takes about a million years to flip every chunk and the oil can get all poppin’ up at you. My advice is to have your family talk to you and try to distract you with dirty jokes and funny anecdotes so that the boring part is minimized and the risky part maximized and now everybody is having a laugh while you run cold water on your fresh grease burns. Yay!! Family Dinner!!

9. Whilst your chicken is changing from poison to awesome, it is time to work on your veg.

10. Wash everything up. Peel your carrots into your Stock Ziploc, and slice them up in ¼ inch slices.

What's the plural of Bris?

11. Zukes are next. Slice down the middle and place the cut side down on your chopping block. Slice both halves into ¼ inch half moons. If you have ever even heard of a zucchini, you have probably performed this little dance. I have faith in your ability to pull this off.

What are you cooking underthere? Underwear?

12. Add to your pan the sliced up carrots and zukes and your other ¼ teaspoon of salt. Follow suit with a few turns on the peppermill and your scant 1/8th teaspoon of weird, gross tarragon. Stir to coat.

13. Cover your business, and reduce your heat from 5 to 3.5 and let it cook for 4 minutes.

Milking your chicken.

14. When your internal or external kitchen timer alerts you that indeed 4 minutes have passed on this gay earth, then slowly stir your slurry into your chicken mixture. Turn your heat up to approx 5 or 6 and bring it to a boil. When you have achieved a boil, cover it up again, reduce heat to 4ish, and simmer 10 minutes or until your sauce thickens, while stirring occasionally.

This is how entitled suburban white women pop a cap.

15. Whilst your sauce is thickening and your veg cooking up, it is time to embark on bread bowl construction. Using your awesome bread knife, turn your roll on its side and cut the top off, about an inch or an inch and a half.

Pinching loaves.

16. Pinch out the guts of your bread bowl, leaving about a ¼ to a ½ inch thick shell that resembles a freaking bowl made out of freaking bread. The bread guts are great to use as breadcrumbs, or in making a crumble topping for mac-n-cheese, or snacking on for the duration of this dinner making. A million uses and still counting. Do not dare throw them shits away.

* doffs a bread hat*

 17. Place your bowls onto a cookie sheet and into the oven. I like to toast up the bread tops as well. Throw them dudes on the rack. Heat for approx 5 minutes, or usually the remainder of time on the chicken, whichever comes first. You want your bowls toasty, not petrified.




18. This would be an excellent time to use the last few minutes to toss together a simple green salad with tomatoes and avocado. Because a meal without avocado is seriously a meal I don’t want to bother eating.

Meat and two-veg goes in the hole.

19. Pop your bread bowls out of the oven, remove your chicken mix from heat, and let it cool off and thicken up for just a second while you get plates and set tables and ask everybody what they want to drink and pour yourself another glass of cooking wine. Scoop out half the chicken mix into one bowl. I am going to leave it up to you fine folks to figure out what to do with the other half of chicken mix and bread bowl. This is a learning process and it isn’t fair for me to cheat you out of the magic of self-discovery herein.

20. Plate it up and serve it up and watch as your family says Oh Damn, This Looks Awesome, when it was seriously the easiest shit you did all day. Bone Appetitty!!

One bread bowl + 1 ¼ cups of chicken mixture has approx. 500 calories and 8 grams of fat, but probably more since I used the colossal bread bowls and not the dinky 4.5 ouncers.