Lightened Up Individual Chicken Pot Pies

Why am I blogging about a dish that screams winter time?? I don’t know, maybe because I had a craving for yummy chicken pot pie, maybe because I am dreaming of cooler weather, and a friend asked me to show him how to make a homemade pie crust. Perfect excuse right? But I did attempt to skinny up the recipe a bit, so the only thing too terribly unhealthy is the pie crust. Sorry, but you just can’t skinny up pie crust. My philosophy is that life is all about balance and you should eat healthy 90% of the time, but occasionally you need to treat yo’ self. Rather than trying to make everything healthier and not have it taste good in the process, like a pie crust, just eat the real thing, but do it in moderation. Don’t eat pie crust every day or even every week…If you are looking for a good pie crust recipe, I use Julia Child’s pate brisee pretty religiously. Apparently I need to add that to the recipe archives here on the blog because a quick google search did not easily send back her exact recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking without some digging. Thanks to Dining with Debbie for being a purist. To lighten this up, I used low sodium chicken broth and non-fat milk. I used olive oil instead of butter and cut down on the amount of fat and flour. I rolled the pie crust as thin as possible too! I was able to get the calories to just over 400 for an ENTIRE RAMEKIN!

If you find that your filling is not thickening enough to your liking, you can make a slurry of 2 to 1 water to flour and pour that into the filling while it is simmering. You may need to increase the temp a little the allow it to cook out the flour and thicken. To make it easier I also used a rotisserie chicken from Costco with the skin removed and all of the chicken pulled off the bone and chopped into chunky pieces.

 How do I describe how delicious this turned out? It was the perfect chicken pot pie. So flavorful! I did not get bored of eating on it even with how much it made!! I mean, this recipe makes 8 individual ramekins, so we ate this for dinner 5 or 6 times!! We served it with a side salad, so we did not manage to eat a whole one individually each time. That also helped to cut down on calories. You could easily stretch this by eating half of one and saving the other half for lunch or dinner the next day. I am betting these would also freeze beautifully! Just wrap the unbaked pot pie tightly with saran wrap or foil, then put into a freezer bag and pop them into the freezer. To bake, you could put them directly into the oven frozen, but the cooking time would increase substantially – it would likely take 60-90 minutes, but watch them carefully. They would be done when the filling is bubbly and the top is lightly browned. I’m keeping this recipe in my back pocket for those cold winter nights that will be here before you know it!!