A very pleasant lunch was spent recently with friends eating royal pie at Pleasant House Bakery . If you are in Chicago, I highly recommend a trip there. It's a very casual place, but sunlight brightens the small dining room and on the day we went, the counter staff were pip pip cheery-o eager to make sure we had a delicious British workingman's meal.
The kids and I had already been experimenting with empenada style pies using this brand of buttermilk biscuit dough. (I read on-line that a recipe re-viewer's Chilean grandma uses it for her empenada dough, and I had to try it.) We made a filling together and they had fun spooning the filling onto the dough, folding the other half over and pressing the edges with a fork.
Ground turkey empenada filling that passes the kid taste test
Brown 1.5 cups of ground turkey in a frying pan with a little oil. Add 1/2 C. tomato sauce, 1/4 C. golden raisins, and 1/4 C. diced red or orange bell pepper. Season with 1/2 t. chili powder and salt. Let simmer for 10 min to blend the flavors and soften the peppers. Remove from heat and put in a bowl. Let cool for 10 minutes, then add 1/2 C. shredded cheese. Mix well.
Open biscuit dough and roll out each biscuit until it is an oval that is 1/8" thick.
Spoon about 1-2T. of the turkey mixture on one half of rolled out dough before folding over the other half. Seal edges by pressing the tines of a fork around edges. Brush tops with egg wash and sprinkle sea salt or a dry herb mix on top. Bake empenadas on a pan at 375F for 12-15 minutes or until golden brown.
They didn't eat theirs with sauce, but Chief Rail and I put fresh tomato salsa on top of ours.
After our lunch at Pleasant House, I got inspired to use a muffin tin and the same buttermilk bisuit dough to make chicken pot pies. The kids ate them up and asked for seconds. No joke. It's scary-easy to use that dough. I am starting to think that most everything might taste good "pocket style".
For these, I rolled the raw biscuits out to about 1/8" thick 6" diameter circles and pressed the dough into lightly oiled muffin tin cups. Then the kids and I filled the cups with the pot pie mixture, gathered the overhanging dough and pinched it together at the top so it looked like Vietnamese Bao. We brushed them with egg wash and sprinkled the adult ones with Herbs de Provence then baked them at 350F for about 15 minutes until they looked like the picture. They came undone a little in the baking, but didn't spill their cups. Let them cool for about 5 minutes, and then when you are ready to eat, run a knife around the edge to loosen them from the tin. They were fantastic. I could see serving these at a dinner party. Sprinkle a little flour on the counter top and people will think you made the dough yourself.
Just kidding purists.
You can use any chicken pot pie recipe you like, but my kids do not like onions or cooked celery. Too "slimy". So with that thought: here is the recipe for the filling we made.
Chicken pot pie recipe for kids (no slimy stuff)
Make a white roux by melting 2 T. butter in a sauce pan, adding 2 T. flour and mix with a whisk. Allow to bubble for 30 seconds or so, but don't let it burn. Whisk in 1/2 C. chicken broth and allow mix to thicken. Whisk in 1/2 C. milk, add 1/2 C. green peas. Season with salt, a dash of Maggi sauce, 1/2 t. of dried herb mix and a few sprinkles of smoked paprika if your kids will let you... let pot simmer while you:
Cut 1 C. raw chicken breast into 1/2" cubes. Brown chicken in a frying pan with a little oil. Add 1/4 C. diced raw carrots, 1/4 C. chopped raw broccoli and let vegetables soften for about 5 minutes. Add this to the roux with peas and mix well. Use this filling in the dough filled muffin tin.
YUM. YUM. YUM.
Must make.
Posted by: Alzone | 10/21/2011 at 07:52 PM