Cute Little Chicken Pot Pies

This is me in my fantastic cooking chair.  Nate calls it the captain's chair.  You see how tiny my lil kitchen is and how I can basically push myself all over.  The chair cost about $150 and it's from Staples - it was their last one so you'd have to order it online.  The gate is to keep Misty the Cat from being under the wheels.  When I cook, Misty thinks it is all for her and will hang out under me.  I think she may have possibly noticed how much stuff falls to the floor when I am at the helm.

Over my February break, I made these chicken pot pies for the first time with my friend Cindy.  We knew we would want lots of them so we made tons extra and froze them.  Since then, I have made them twice more - making tons extra for freezing.  Freeze them before baking.

Today I came home feeling a way-too-swift return of my leg pain post-epidural.  No doubt made worse by the fact that I never got to really sit down today.  I didn't really get great sleep last night so the combination of low sleep and a stressful day may have increased my inflammation overall.  While I'm at the complaining part of this post, I will say that my esophagus was in full spasm several times today too.  I don't have great management of the esophagus right now.  The medications for the esophagus are all heart medicines that relax cardiac muscle.  They also relax the smooth muscles of the esophagus.  I was on one that worked amazingly well until it led to EXTREME ankle swelling (sorry for yelling it).  The next one I tried didn't work at all.  Now I have a new one to try but apparently it gives everyone terrible headaches (the dr said that's how you know it's working - wtf?).  So I'm sort of holding off on that.  I've been getting by using the medicine I have for acute esophageal spasm.  Eating and drinking remain a challenge.

I used to have salad type things every day for lunch at school.  Now, I usually have a yogurt and some fruit.  Yogurt is so easy to digest and swallow.  I have eaten more yogurt in the past 2 months than ever before in my life.  I'm totally hooked on chobani.  Right now, I'm all about strawberry.

So I had big plans of making a new recipe for dinner so that I would have something to share here.  I guess that will have to wait.  I was so grateful that I had these little chicken pot pies left in the freezer from a few weeks ago.  I based them on this recipe from the Food Network by Melissa d'Arabian.  I never have followed the amounts - I just make large amounts of the chicken mixture and 2 packages of puff pastry.  Here are the amounts approximately that I have used:

1 large onion chopped
1 bunch celery chopped
4-6 carrots chopped
5 cloves of garlic
3T flour
1 C white wine
2 C chicken stock
2-3 T dijon mustard
1 C peas
2 packages of chicken breast, cooked and chopped small (I boiled the chicken)

Follow her recipe for cooking, deglazing the pan, etc.  You end up with a beautiful gravy surrounding chicken and veggies.  Roll out the puff pastry.  I made each turnover a rectangle about 4X6 inches then fold it over and seal the edges.  Freeze them like this, then you can just pop them out onto parchment paper and bake at 350 for 15 minutes.  If you cook right away, you end up with a better puff pastry.  This is sort of a labor intensive meal because you have to boil and cook all that chicken, and then stuff the pastries.  It's worth doing on a weekend when you have time and making tons of it.  Trust me, you'll be glad to have these little babies in your freezer.