pretty by the bay

My mom’s chicken potpie is the stuff of dreams. She takes chicken and veggies, coats them with a layer of gravy, and tops the whole shebang with homemade pie crust. The crust is the key ingredient, but it also makes it a rather labor intensive dish. I could take the easy way out and use store bought crust, but there’s something extra delicious about making a potpie from scratch.

Enter Mark Bittman. His Bitten and Minimalist columns offer a reliable stream of easy, delicious recipes that seem to provide perfect solutions for all of my culinary conundrums. In a recent column, Bittman agreed with my assessment that traditional crust-topped potpies are delicious, but a little too time consuming for most home cooks. His solution is a quick stovetop filling topped with a simple biscuit dough. It’s still made from scratch – no Bisquick here! – and tastes almost as good as my mom’s pie crust version. The biscuit dough has enough butter to make it rich and flaky, but it’s not overpowering or greasy. Buttermilk adds some additional tenderness and flavor. It bakes to a nice golden brown and adds a nice crunch on top of the filling, which includes diced chicken, leeks, carrots, mushrooms and peas. (I added celery, too, because it just seems necessary to me.)

This was ridiculously easy to prepare, yet tasted like something I’d order in a restaurant. You can vary the fillings – swap white meat for dark, or leave it out altogether and make it a veggie potpie. Except for the addition of celery, I didn’t alter the recipe one bit. Head on over to Bittman’s blog to check it out. Let’s just hope Mom doesn’t read this and see how easy it is…I’m expecting her fully loaded pie crust version when I visit her in May!