"Feasting on the Remains"

I put the title of this post in quotation marks because it is an expression I took from the divine Julia, who used "Feasting on the Remains" as a chapter subtitle in her book The Way to Cook. Sounds much classier than "What to do with the leftovers," don't you think?

To review: thanks to the works of Jacques Pépin, we had this:

However, after dinner that night, I was left with this:

What to do with it?

The problem with leftovers (for me, anyway) is that I rarely want to eat the same thing two nights in a row. So you could, of course, just reheat your leftover chicken, preferably in a little leftover gravy, and serve it forth. But no one has ever said “Oh good—a warmed-over version of last night’s dinner. I’ve been craving that all day.” So something different is usually a good idea.

Chicken salad is an obvious choice, and a quite tasty one, as well. However, chicken salad is pretty straightforward, and I don’t think that it warrants a recipe here. It also involves having celery in one’s pantry, and given that I view celery as the culinary equivalent of self-flagellation, I don’t usually stock it.

A more interesting possibility—at least, one that seems blog-post-worthy—is to borrow from the British and make a chicken pie. The savory pie has all but disappeared from American tables. I’m not sure why, although several decades of soggy Banquet frozen pot pies certainly didn’t help matters. The Brits do this all the time with leftover roast meats and stews; it’s a rare pub that doesn’t have some kind of meat- or poultry-based pie on its menu. Most of the time, pubs serve said pie with a small pitcher of gravy. I am in favor of foods being served with a small pitcher of gravy.

Even I admit that the fries—sorry, chips—are over the top here. So we will simply make a chicken pie and call it a day. That said, I thought it might be interesting to spice up said pie, so I’m going to throw some curry powder into this little beastie. For the record, there is nothing remotely Indian about what I’m about to make here, but the end result would not, I think, be completely out of place in a London pub, and that is what I’m aiming for. A different sort of authenticity, if you will.

Unlike previous posts, there is no single “original” recipe here. This is mostly drawing on Sydney Oland’s Curried Chicken Pie recipe on Serious Eats for ingredients and proportions; for techniques and cooking times, I consulted Jamie Oliver’s iPad app, which has a recipe for Chicken and Leek pie, but this is one of those times when you have to wing it.

I started by toasting some brown mustard seeds in a small, dry pan. This is optional, so don't get excited if you have no mustard seeds in the pantry.




When you heat them, the seeds start popping, rather like microscopic popcorn. It is best to put a mesh screen on the pan, lest the seeds go flying all over the stove, in the manner of (as a friend of mine once put it) “a flea circus on crack cocaine.”



Once the seeds turn grey and pop, remove them from the heat.

Btw, that little cast-iron skillet belonged to my grandmother (and possibly my great-grandmother). It’s less than six inches across, and I have no idea what she used it for. I’m reasonably certain she didn’t use it to toast spices for curries, though, which is how I tend to use it.

But I digress. Slice a good-sized onion.

Sauté the onion over medium heat in some butter and/or oil, sprinkling with a little salt. Stir occasionally.



While the onions cook, peel and chop a few carrots.



Add the carrots to the pan and cook for a minute or two. Stir in a clove or two of chopped garlic. You could add some chopped celery, too, if you had some. Chopped ginger wouldn't go amiss, either.



Cover the pan, lower the heat to medium-low, and let the mixture cook for 10-15 minutes, while you deal with the chicken (if you haven't already).

Remove the skin from the chicken, take the meat off the bones, and cut into bite-size pieces. It's pretty much impossible to do this and take pictures at the same time. 

Now things get interesting (relatively speaking). Remove the pan lid and turn up the heat to medium-high. Cook for a minute or two until any juices have evaporated, and then stir in 2 tablespoons of curry powder.

Stir for a minute or two, so that the curry powder toasts a bit in the oil until it becomes fragrant—i.e., when the smell becomes much more pronounced and wafts its way up to your nose. Forgive me for getting bossy, but this is a key step--if you don't toast the spices in the pan, they will taste raw, powdery, and harsh, which is the culinary equivalent of nasty, brutish, and short. I used a hot Madras curry powder, but of course you could use a milder one, or create your own spice blend. I like to give you folks a lot of latitude.

Stir in 2 tablespoons of flour, and stir that around for a minute or two as well. You don't need the flour to brown, but it should cook for a bit so it doesn't taste pasty and raw. So commands Julia. 

After that, stir in 2 cups (or so) of chicken broth. It should come to the boil and thicken fairly rapidly.

Stir in the chicken. 

You will get something like this. If you have been leading a virtuous life, and feel you should reward yourself, you can stir in a few tablespoons of cream (or coconut milk, if you have it). If you are a shameless hedonist like me, you put it in anyway. Also, stir in those mustard seeds we toasted a while back. Turn off the heat while we turn our attention to the crust. 

For those of you who prefer the path of least resistance (you know who you are), I should note that you could stop here and serve this as is, with some rice and a green vegetable of some kind. No shame in that. You could stir in a handful of peas if you liked, simmering them for a few minutes to thaw and heat through (I'm assuming you're using frozen peas). I don't like peas much, so I didn't. Green beans would also work, or perhaps some spinach. You could also cool the entire mixture down, refrigerate it, and return to it a day or two later. 

But back to the pie construction. This is a sheet of frozen puff pastry. You need to thaw it in the refrigerator overnight before you use it (You should have thought of this yesterday). You could use frozen pie dough instead, should that be easier to obtain. And of course, you could make your own crust, or your own puff pastry, for that matter. But the likelihood of doing so to use up leftover chicken seems unlikely, at least in my household. Oh, and did I say preheat your oven to 400 degrees F?

Put the thawed pastry on a floured board, and roll it out slightly, so that it will fit your pie dish. Trim off the excess dough (a pizza cutter is useful for this).

Put the chicken mixture into a pie dish. Brush the rim of the dish with a beaten egg. I neglected to mention that I threw some chopped parsley into the chicken mixture. Cilantro would work as well. 

Lay the pastry dough on top of the pie. 

Brush the crust with beaten egg, and cut some slits in the crust. This is not for decoration, btw; it's to release steam. If you didn't cut the slits, the steam from the filling could build up and blow a huge hole in the crust. I suspect it would be a rather entertaining sight if it were someone else's oven. 

But I digress. Put the pie into the 400-degree oven and bake for 20-30 minutes, until the crust is puffed and browned. 

It will look more or less like this.



I find a large spoon works best for serving.

As it's a bit messy, serving it in a shallow bowl (rather than a plate) is probably a good idea.

And we're done. I flatter myself in thinking that it would not appear completely out of place in a London pub.

Obviously, this can be varied any way you like. You needn't use curry spices at all—you can make a more conventional chicken pot pie. You could use leftover turkey, or leftover pork. Or if you had no leftovers, you could start by cooking boneless chicken thighs and proceed from there. You could make individual pies, as Oland does. In short, you can make pretty much any stew you like, put it in a dish, throw a crust on it, bake it, and tuck in. In lieu of putting an authoritative recipe at the end (this post is long enough as it is), I'm going to repeat my links for Oland's recipe and Oliver's app, which were my starting points. Bon appetìt, y'all.