Chicken Pot Pie Baked in a Wood Cookstove

This is a picture of an earlier chicken pot pie which
was baked in the Margin Gem; it's not the one you
will see in the photos below.

One thing Nancy and I both love is good chicken pot pie, and we're pretty happy with the version that I make.  Pulling a meat pie out of the oven of a woodburning cookstove gives one a feeling of satisfaction that is a close second to that of a beautifully browned turkey or a golden loaf of bread.

As always with any wood coookstove dish that is going to be baked, the first thing you have to do is to build your fire and heat the oven.  You need a "hot" oven for baking a pot pie, so build your fire so that your oven will run at about 425ºF.

I think the second step to making a really good chicken pot pie is making the right crust, and I'm excited to share the recipe that I use.  It originated from my reprint of the 1950 Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook (Wiley Publishing, Inc. and General Mills, Inc.), and it was labeled "English Pastry."  For a meat pie, especially a chicken pot pie, I think people generally are looking for a thicker, richer crust than one might find on a homemade fruit pie, for example.  As always, I've tweaked the recipe a bit, and now it's exactly what I'm looking for.

The ingredient list for the crust is as follows:

2 cups sifted all-purpose flour

2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

2/3 cup butter flavor Crisco

1/2 c. hot water

1 Tablespoon lemon juice

1 egg yolk

1 egg white

1 Tablespoon cold water

Here is what you do:

1. Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt together.

2. Measure the butter flavor Crisco and pour the half cup of hot water over it from the teakettle.  Obviously, this will soften the shortening significantly.

3. Add the tablespoon of lemon juice to the shortening/hot water mixture and stir around a little.

4. While stirring the above mixture vigorously, add the egg yolk.  You've got to stir while doing this so that the egg yolk doesn't cook.

5. Combine the wet ingredients with the dry, stirring until no lumps of shortening are visible.

6. Pop the crust mixture into the freezer to chill while you mix and cook the filling.  If you're not going to be assembling this pie immediately, just put the pastry dough into the fridge.

Now, in the pictures that you see below, I used a quart of chicken breast meat that I had canned on the Margin Gem last fall.  When I can chicken, I fill the jar loosely with pieces of meat, and then I fill the jar to an inch from the top with hot water and add a bouillon cube or two.  After the meat has been processed in the pressure canner, the chicken usually condenses down to a little over a pint of meat swimming in about that much broth.

Here is what I did for the filling.  I'm sorry that there aren't any hard and fast measurements for any of this; it is always just by guess and by golly.

7. Drain the quart of canned chicken, putting the broth in a tall-sided frying pan.  I use my Magnalite chicken fryer.  To the broth I added one bouillon cube and a teaspoon of chicken base.  Put that directly over the firebox to come to a good boil.

8. While that was heating, I poured about a 1/2 cup of heavy cream into it along with the juice from a six-ounce can of mushrooms.

9. Add a half teaspoon of paprika, a dash of pepper, and a sprinkling of seasoned salt.

10. I beat about six tablespoons of all-purpose flour into a cup of cold milk until it was smooth.  

11. While stirring the hot mixture constantly, I added the milk and flour mixture. 

12. Once the flour and milk is added, stir constantly with a fork until everything comes to a boil and begins to thicken.  Once that happens, add the canned chicken, the canned mushrooms, a tablespoon of onion flakes, and a cup or two of mixed vegetables.  Bring everything to a boil again, stirring quite frequently.

13. Move the filling mixture as far away from the fire as possible so that it will just simmer very gently while you work on the crust.

14. Whisk the egg white and cold water from the crust ingredients until they're a little frothy on top.

15. Remove the pastry dough from wherever you had it chilling.  Pat 3/4 of the dough into the bottom and up the sides of a deep dish pie pan.  I find that our Pampered Chef deep dish stoneware pie plate is perfect for this.

16. Roll out the remaining pastry dough until it is just large enough to fit over the top of the pie.  I didn't stop quite soon enough in the picture below.

17. Pour the hot filling into the bottom crust, leaving about a half-inch of space at the top so that the pie won't boil over in your oven.

18. Put the top crust on the pie, pinching the edges together to seal.  (I'm embarrassed at the looks of this one as I didn't center the crust right and had to go back and patch it.)

19. Poke holes in the top crust to vent the pie; then brush the egg white/water mixture over the top.

20. Slide the pie into the hot oven and bake for about 25 minutes or until the pastry is a beautiful brown.

I took a picture of the oven thermometer while the pie was in the oven.  If you look closely, you can tell that the thermometer doesn't indicate that the oven is anywhere close to 425ºF, but experience tells me that it is.  If the thermometer on your wood cookstove's oven is not accurate, that doesn't mean that it's not useful.  For example, after almost a decade of baking in the Margin Gem, I don't pay any attention to the numbers on the thermometer.  Instead, it is more helpful to think of the thermometer like a clock face.  If the needle is pointing to 10:00, the oven is at 350º.  Eleven o'clock is 375º; noon is 400º; one o'clock is 425ºF.  If the needle goes past three o'clock, I need to open the oven door! 

After three or four attempts at photographing what the fire looks like in order to maintain a hot oven in the Margin Gem, I settled on this one.

Watch the pie carefully during the last few minutes.  When you're baking at an oven temperature this high, you don't want to let the crust burn.

Doesn't the egg white wash make a nice looking
crust?

I took this picture because I wanted to show that when this crust
is baked in a stone pie plate, it pulls away from the edges once
it's done (as long as you've done a good job of sealing the edges
and none of the filling has boiled down between the crust and
and the pan). You can see it particularly well at the lower left side.

21. After you remove the chicken pot pie from the oven, let it cool for a few minutes before you cut into it.  That will let the filling thicken even more, and it will be easier to neatly remove a piece.  

A piece of the finished chicken pot pie.

We find that this version of chicken pot pie reheats into very tasty leftovers.  In this household, that is a very high recommendation for any recipe!

The picture below is of the pie in the picture at the beginning of this post before it was baked.  I included it to prove that I can actually make a top crust that doesn't have to be patched!

Homemade Chicken Nuggets on the Wood Cookstove: A Gluten Free Meat Stretcher

This is the first time that I've ever posted a recipe on my blog that involves deep-fat frying on the wood cookstove.  We don't deep-fat fry often at all, but I'd like to.  I have to admit that I enjoy fried foods.  I always say that if someone deep-fat fried rocks, I'd eat them.

Historically, wood cookstove cooks were very willing to deep-fat fry foods (especially breads) because it is easier to manage the temperature of the cooking oil than the temperature of the oven.  Now, please don't read the last sentence and believe that it is difficult to bake in a wood cookstove. We do have to consider, however, the fact some stove designs are better than others; and no matter what design the stove is, stovetop cooking is easier than baking.  Of course, people also didn't consider fried foods as unhealthy as they do now.

So, for my first post about deep-fat frying on a wood cookstove, I'd like to share with you my method for making homemade chicken nuggets.  You might find it odd that I called chicken nuggets a meat stretcher, and I can assure you that I was very surprised to find out that this was so.  Here's how it works: If Nancy and I were going to have Poor Man's Chicken Monterey, I would cook two chicken breasts.  However, if we were going to have homemade chicken nuggets, one chicken breast would be more than sufficient.  Thus, you can stretch a small amount of chicken over quite a few people by using this method of preparing it.

Here is what you need:

Cornstarch

Buttermilk

Baking Powder

Eggs

Pepper and Seasoned Salt (or whatever seasonings you want)

Chicken (We use either boneless breasts or thighs.)

Now, the first thing to do is to build a hot fire in the wood cookstove. Whenever you deep-fat fry, you  need a very hot fire.

Second, put an inch of oil in the bottom of some kind of pan with tall sides. I like to deep-fat fry in a cast iron chicken fryer.  You want something with tall sides so that the hot oil doesn't slosh or splatter out onto the cooktop of the stove.  Place the pan of oil on the hottest part of the cooktop to begin heating.  It goes without saying that whenever you have oil heating for deep-fat frying, you want to keep an eye on it.  This is especially true when you are heating oil on any kind of stove where the heat beneath the oil is not under thermostatic control.

Usually, the hottest part of the cooktop on the Margin Gem is
right between the two lids over the firebox and slightly to the
right. Thus, this is where the pan of oil for frying the chicken
 nuggets was placed.

The third thing to do is cut the chicken up into small pieces.  Usually, I try to cut the pieces into 1" x 2" pieces that are about 3/8" thick.  You can make them as large as you want, but the smaller they are, the quicker they will cook and the further you can stretch the meat.

The chicken cut into small pieces for making the nuggets.  We
were using boneless thighs in this picture.

Next, beat two eggs in a medium to large mixing bowl.  (I prefer to use a bowl that has a fairly flat bottom to make coating the chicken easier, so I usually use our 8-cup glass Pyrex measuring cup.)

Add 1 cup of cornstarch, about 3/4 tsp. baking powder, pepper and seasoned salt to taste, and enough buttermilk to make a batter that is a little thicker than pancake and waffle batter.  Using cornstarch instead of flour is what makes this recipe gluten-free, and it also allows the batter to cling to the chicken better.

Dip the chicken pieces into the batter, being sure to coat them on all sides. Place them in the hot oil and begin frying them on one side.

     

Fry them until they are a deep golden brown on the bottom side.  The fire should be kept very hot during the entire time that the nuggets are frying.

I moved the pan a little so that I could get a shot of the raging
fire I had under the chicken nuggets.

Turn the nuggets over with a fork so that they can fry on the other side.  As long as the size of the chicken pieces has been kept fairly thin, there won't be any trouble with the chicken being thoroughly cooked in the same amount of time it takes for the outside of them to become a nice golden brown.

Remove the chicken nuggets to a paper-towel-covered plate to drain and cool a little before they are eaten.

Finished chicken nuggets.

I like to dip my chicken nuggets in sweet and sour sauce, whereas Nancy prefers barbecue sauce or ranch dressing.  Either way, these are cheap and quick.

Some words of caution about deep-fat frying on a wood cookstove:

1. Oil spilled on the cooktop can easily ignite.  At the very least, it will smoke horribly, so be careful to prevent that.

2. In order to adjust the heat beneath the frying oil, you may need to move the pan around on the stovetop.  This can be dangerous, so be careful!

3. As soon as you are done frying, you'll need to remove the pan of hot oil from the stove.  This also can be dangerous, so plan accordingly.

And a hint:

In order to get the oil for deep-fat frying hot enough, I sometimes have had to remove one of the lids over the fire and place the pan directly above the flames.  This does perhaps elevate the level of danger, but I'm not sure that it would be any worse than deep-fat frying over a gas flame.

I hope to eventually share a few more deep-fat fried recipes, but even though I enjoy fried foods, I don't make them at home very often.

As a record-keeping side note, we operated the Margin Gem daily from September 21, 2018, to May 14, 2019.  I would have liked to continue using the stove daily well after the fourteenth of May, but though we haven't been affected at all by the local flooding, we have had a very wet spring, and we just plain ran out of dry fuel.  We have run the stove a couple of times in the month of June, too, since it's been pretty cool a lot of the summer.

Cheating with Your Wood Cookstove: Creamed Chicken over Biscuits

I don't remember exactly when my mom started making creamed chicken over biscuits, but I remember that I was not a little kid anymore, that it was an instant hit, and that I wondered why she hadn't tried it on us earlier.  Of course, maybe it was all very strategic.  If she had served it to us too early, our palates wouldn't have been developed well enough to fully appreciate the pleasure of this stick-to-your ribs dish, and we might have summarily rejected it as we did with several more "grown up" foods that she tried on us.  She likes to tell people how long her list of recipes-to-try-again-when-the-kids-are-gone was when we were young.

At any rate, it was Mom who initially got me hooked on this entree.  My mother-in-law also has her family hooked on her version of Creamed Chicken over Biscuits, but her method for making it is entirely different.  Both recipes are delicious, but in this post I'm going to share my mom's version.  

You can see from the labels on this post, that this is a dish made from leftovers.  Therefore, prior to this meal, you need to have roasted a chicken (to read about one way to do that in a wood cookstove click here) and made gravy from the drippings.  We had several people in my family as guests for a Sunday dinner back in August and served a roasted chicken with all the trimmings.  After the meal, Nancy picked the leftover chicken off the bones, and we saved the leftover gravy too.  A few days later, we made Creamed Chicken over Biscuits.

The first thing to do is to build a really hot fire.  Biscuits bake best in a quick oven, and so I always use a lot of little sticks, or "biscuit wood," to accomplish this.

The hot fire built of "biscuit wood" in the Margin Gem wood
cookstove.

 

To make biscuits, I used to always cut the shortening into the flour, but I've taken to a different method of incorporating shortening that my friend Leah told me about.  Now, while the oven is heating, I melt my shortening on the stove.  Sometimes I use the warming oven, other times the lid of the reservoir--wherever I think the heat will be sufficient.  This time I used a very small saucepan on the top of the stove.  I melted perhaps a 1/3 cup of Crisco.

While the shortening is melting, sift two cups of flour into a mixing bowl and add around a tablespoon of baking powder to it.  At this point you might sprinkle a little salt in too if you wish.  Mix all the dry ingredients together.

Once the shortening has melted, pour it into a heat-proof measuring cup. Then add enough cold milk or buttermilk to make one cup altogether while stirring constantly.  The coldness of the liquid causes the shortening to congeal again, thus allowing it to be evenly incorporated into your flour. Brilliant!  (I hate washing the pastry blender.)

Pour the buttermilk/shortening mixture over the flour mixture and toss lightly to mix.  Don't work the dough too hard as that will make for tough biscuits later!

Turn the dough out onto a floured board.

Knead the dough a few times, then pat out until it is about an inch thick.

Cut the biscuits in the shape and size you desire.  For many years I cut biscuits with an old metal drinking glass that Gramps kept by the utility room sink when our house was still his home.  The problem was that cutting the biscuits resulted in compressing the air in the glass, and sometimes it would "burp," causing the biscuit to become misshapen.  Last year, one of the fundraisers at school had a set of biscuit cutters on it, and I'm very pleased with my four various sized biscuit cutters.

Six beautifully cut biscuits and one not so beautiful because
it is the trimmings patted together.

Let the biscuits rest for at least five minutes.  The baking powder will cause them to rise a little, and they will be nice and light.

The next step is to put together the creamed chicken.  Here is where this recipe really qualifies as what I would call "cheating."  To whatever leftover gravy you have from the roast chicken dinner, add a can of cream of chicken soup.  Add whatever leftover chicken you have to the gravy/soup mixture.

Pop the biscuits into the hot oven now.

Put the chicken/gravy/soup mixture on the stove to come to a boil.  You probably won't want to put this right over the firebox since your fire will be so hot for baking the biscuits.  You can see in the picture below that mine was closer to the reservoir than to the fire.

If the gravy was quite thick, you may need to add a little water or milk. Don't do this until you've had a chance to warm the gravy/soup mixture, though, because leftover gravy congeals in the refrigerator and may look deceptively thick until it is heated through.

The soup/gravy/chicken combination coming to a boil over
gentle heat.

Once the creamed chicken has come to a good boil, move it to a place where it can be kept hot while your biscuits finish baking.

The biscuits finishing up in the oven while the
creamed chicken is staying warm on a simmering
pad on the back of the range.

To serve, pour the creamed chicken over the biscuits and enjoy.  I like to drizzle a bit of honey over the top of it all.

The finished product.

Notes:

 

1. You could make your own white sauce instead of using the can of cream of chicken soup.  Then this recipe is no longer cheating.

 

2. My favorite side dish for this is peas, which I like to mix into the creamed chicken mixture.  Peas are not Nancy's favorite side dish, though, so you don't see them in the picture.

 

3. As with most chicken recipes, turkey can be substituted in this dish, and this is one of our family's favorite post-Thanksgiving meals.

Roasting a Chicken in a Woodburning Cookstove

I mentioned in my last post that I had several blog posts started.  This is not one of those posts, but I want to share what we had for our noon dinner today because it was so simple and turned out so delicious.

Usually, when I roast a chicken, I use my aunt Meme's ancient Wagner Ware "Drip-Drop Baster" roaster which had belonged to her mother and undoubtedly saw the inside of a woodburning cookstove's oven many times.  I'm not going to completely abandon that method of roasting chicken, but when we were at the Dutchman's Store in Cantril, Iowa, this spring, I purchased the Crow Canyon Home red enamelware roasting pan that you see in the pictures below.  I hadn't used it until today, however.

Because the fire in the Margin Gem was already burning, I added a bunch of small sticks and pieces of bark because I wanted to get the oven up to at least 400 degrees.  Roasting whole poultry at a high initial heat causes the skin to brown beautifully, and that was the goal.

After the fire was roaring, I placed the whole chicken in the center of the roasting pan and surrounded it with some small red potatoes that we had purchased at our local farmers' market this summer.  I then added several pearl onions from our garden, some celery stalks, and sections of whole carrots.  Next, I took a whole bulb of garlic and separated it into its individual, peeled cloves and dispersed them among the vegetables.  Into the cavity of the chicken, I placed the leaves of the celery stalks, two of the garlic cloves, and one whole pearl onion.

I sprinkled some Lawry's Seasoned Salt, several pinches of poultry seasoning that I also purchased at our local farmers' market from Wild Rose Farm, and some freshly ground pepper over the whole kit and caboodle.

The chicken and vegetables seasoned and ready to be roasted.

Everything was then ready to be placed into a quick oven.

I decided to keep the oven running hot for the duration of the roasting time, so I used a lot of small sticks and pieces of wood.  I added a little boiling water from the teakettle about midway through, and in an hour and half, our dinner was done.  Nancy and I both thought it was excellent.

When I roast a chicken this way again, I will try basting the vegetables and the bird several times during the cooking.  This should make the meat even more flavorful and moist, and I may consider adding some fruit to the vegetables.  What did take a lot of time was peeling all of the pearl onions and garlic cloves, but using wedges from a larger onion would speed that process considerably.

Let me know how you roast a chicken in your wood cookstove by utilizing the comments section below!  I always enjoy correspondence from my readers.

Asiago Chicken

I've been remiss in my blog posting over the last few months, and for that I apologize.  I should have actually written this post back in March when the pictures were snapped, but I guess that life got in the way.

The recipe that I'm going to share here is one that I "devised" back in late January or early February and is really much more of a cold weather, stick-to-your-ribs kind of dish than what I would be interested in making this time of year.  Maybe "devised" isn't quite the right word.  I got the idea for this dish from the dinner at my cousin's wedding a few years ago.  The catering company was not about to share their recipe, of course, so I looked at recipes for Asiago sauce online and studied them a little.  A couple weeks later I struck out on my own, and this was the result of my endeavor.  It was a hit with my family, and we ended up using it as the entree at our church's Valentine Dinner.

The pictures that you will see below are from when we did an encore meal with some good friends of ours and their twin daughters.  We served this meal with homemade noodles, so the first picture is of the noodle dough being mixed; however, I think rice or potatoes would be equally good starchy accompaniments.

Step one for the actual Asiago Chicken is to pound out five or six chicken breasts (I think there's actually enough sauce for more like ten of them).

We pound the breasts out with the edge of a dessert plate.

Once the chicken breasts are flattened, roll two slices of dried beef into a single cylinder (this is sold as "deli smoked beef" in our local Fareway store.  Don't get the stuff in the vacuum pack from the nationally known packing house; it tastes like dog food).  Then wrap the chicken breast around the dried beef cylinder.  Wrap two slices of bacon around the chicken/dried beef crosswise.  If necessary, you can secure the whole thing with a centrally located toothpick.

The dried beef/chicken/bacon combinations as they are being
put into a baking dish.

We cooked five breast combinations for four adults and two
youngsters, and it was plenty of meat.  I wish we had gotten
a picture of the dried beef on the inside.

Pop the meat into a moderate oven for about an hour, or until the chicken is cooked thoroughly.

While the meat is in the oven, it is time to work on the Asiago sauce.  Melt 3 tablespoons of butter in a deep skillet.  I like to use our Magnalite chicken fryer because of its nice tall edges.  In the butter, brown seven minced cloves of garlic.  As you can see, this is done directly over the firebox.

Browning the minced garlic.

Now, I am ordinarily not a person who cooks with wine.  I just have never really tasted wine that I liked.  However, I do pour perhaps a 1/4 cup of white wine into the garlic and butter in order to deglaze the pan.  This is best done directly over the fire in order to cook away as much of the alcohol as possible.

Deglazing the pan with a little white wine.

Now comes the good stuff.  Pour in one quart of cream.  Yup, that's right: one quart of cream.  Don't question it.  Don't analyze it.  Don't substitute milk.  Use 1/2 and 1/2 if you must, but don't mess with it any more than that . . . . and don't tell my doctor.

Add a splash of dried parsley for color and flavor, a dash of salt and pepper, and some garlic salt if you want.

Bring the mixture to a boil over the fire, stirring pretty much constantly.

Mix 1/4 cup of sifted all-purpose flour in a half cup of milk until smooth while you are waiting for the boil to be reached.

Continuing to stir the sauce directly over the fire.

Once you've reached the boiling point, add the flour and milk mixture for thickening along with a generous tablespoon of sour cream.

Adding the tablespoon of sour cream.

Then add a 1/4 pound of grated Asiago cheese, stirring constantly until the cheese is completely melted and the sauce has thickened a little.

Once the sauce is cooked, put the whole pan on a trivet or simmering pad as far away from the fire as you can.  You just want the sauce to stay warm.

The sauce resting on a simmering pad away from the fire.

The young ladies in the first picture above had charge of the camera for awhile, and they caught a couple of cool pictures of the fire as I was stirring and refueling.  I thought their height created an angle into the firebox that I would not ordinarily have caught.

Remove the meat from the oven when it is thoroughly cooked (no pink in the chicken, juices running clear).

Pour the sauce over the chicken (and the pasta, potatoes, rice, or whatever else you want--people generally seem to want to put it on everything) and serve.

I hope you enjoy this as much as we do!

Here's the recipe in a little more accessible fashion:

Asiago Chicken

10-20 pieces of good dried beef

5-10 boneless skinless chicken breasts

10-20 pieces of bacon

1. Pound the chicken breasts flat.

2. Roll two slices of the dried beef into a cylinder.

3. Wrap a chicken breast around the dried beef cylinder.

4. Wrap two slices of bacon around the chicken breast crosswise.

5. Repeat until you have used all of the chicken breasts.

6. Bake in a moderate oven until thoroughly cooked (about an hour).

Sauce:

3 T. butter

7 cloves garlic, minced

about a 1/4 c. white wine

1 quart cream

dried parsley flakes--maybe 1/4 c.

salt

pepper

1/4 cup sifted flour

1/2 cup milk

1 generous T. sour cream

1/4 lb. Asiago cheese, grated

1. In a tall skillet, saute garlic in butter over fire until brown.

2. Add the white wine to the garlic and butter mixture to deglaze the pan.

3. Add cream, parsley flakes, salt, and pepper.

4. Bring mixture to boil, stirring almost constantly.

5. Stir sifted flour into cold milk until smooth.

6. Once cream and garlic mixture boils, add flour and milk mixture and sour cream.

7. Add grated Asiago cheese.

8. Stir until thickened and cheese is completely incorporated.

9. Set aside on simmering pad or trivet away from fire until meat is cooked.

10.  Serve by pouring sauce over chicken wraps.

P.S.  I forgot to mention that one of those beautiful girls in the first photo--I don't know which--said this after observing the cooktop with the sauce, the noodles, the broccoli, the teakettle, and a pot of pancake syrup on it while we were cooking:

"I know why you like cooking on a wood stove: you have room to cook so many things at once!"

Pretty perceptive, isn't she!