Chicken and Biscuit Pot Pie

Yes, I broke down and cooked a chicken-based dish for dinner last night.

It's like this: my refrigerator had frozen a nearly-new bunch of celery, and I couldn't bear to throw the whole thing away, so the easiest way to use it up was in a baked dish or soup. That, and I'd had the canned chicken in my cupboard for some time and wanted to get it out of there. I decided to try canned chicken instead of keeping frozen chicken breasts because with all of our beef, pork and wild game  I don't have much extra freezer space, especially for poultry, and canned chicken just seemed a like an easier way to go, rather than thawing, cubing and cooking frozen chicken breasts.

Turns out, the canned chicken worked just fine, and it was quick and mess-free. For as rarely as I use chicken, in the future I'll probably use cans again for my next chicken dish in 10 months so I don't have to keep a bulk bag in my freezer.

So this is the canned chicken after I'd given it time to brown in the skillet. It looked good, and tasted good, too, no weird textures or funky tastes.

Any recipe that begins with a big pile of fresh vegetables is bound to be good. I salvaged what I could of the non-frozen celery. My '100 best foods to eat for pregnancy' book says that celery is a very good thing to eat while pregnant, as it contributes to skin health and your skin's ability to remain elastic through the whole ordeal.

The book also recommends chocolate milk. :-)

After cooking the onion, celery and carrots in olive oil for a few minutes I added fresh minced garlic and green beans from the freezer.

The vegetables also later had milk and broth added to them, as well as some flour. This was a 'healthy' version of chicken pot pie by Ellie Kreiger from Food Network, and to make it even healthier I think you could easily get away without adding the flour. It ended up pretty thick with the flour, so even reducing it would make the dish lighter.

After everything was mixed and heated in the skillet I added it to my red cast iron casserole dish which has been coming in quite handy lately.

As the vegetables were heating and simmering I had put together the whole wheat biscuit batter for the topping. It turned out pretty thin, and didn't hold its shape very well, so next time I would add some more flour so it looks more biscuit-y and less gloppy.

But, gloppy biscuits and all, it turned out great and was a nice, quick and easy dinner to have on a weeknight - it probably only took me an hour, tops, from start to finish, and that included cleaning and dicing the vegetables.

Here's the link to Food Network.