Comfort food

When I don't have anything really compelling to say (do I ever?), I can always talk about food. It's one of my favorite subjects.

A Sunday evening supper routine at my house these days is chicken and rice, a dish that has evolved slowly over the last couple of years. I like it because you don't really need a recipe to make it, just some general guidelines. I like to tinker in the kitchen, and this presents endless possibilities.

It actually started, believe it or not, in an apple pie class I took a couple of years ago at the local vo-tech. I love pie. Don't mind making them, except I do have pastry issues. Never could seem to get the crust quite right. So I thought the class might offer some help with that problem.

After we made our pies that night and put them in the oven, the teacher started talking about the pastry recipe we'd made, and good ways to adapt it to other uses. Because Thanksgiving was on the horizon, he mentioned that a good way to use up all that leftover turkey was to make a turkey pot pie. A batch of pastry, a couple cans of Cream of Mushroom soup, a can or two of Veg-All and some turkey are all ya need, he said.

Well, I don't like mushrooms, and am fundamentally opposed to putting anything biologically related to athletes foot (both mushrooms and athletes foot are fungi) in my mouth. And I'm not much of a Veg-All man, either. The problem with canned mixed veggies is that the carrots taste like carrots. And the potatoes taste like carrots. And the peas taste like carrots. You get the picture.

But the discussion did get me thinking. The same concept could just as easily be used for chicken pot pie. Sub chicken for turkey, use the Cream of Chicken soup and buy individual cans of the veggies of your choice, and you're on your way. So I started with large casserole dishes of chicken pot pie, complete with a pastry top crust brushed with a little egg yolk and water just before baking to give it that wonderful brown color when baked. Now, if you're wanting a shiny surface on your pastry, you'd brush a little egg white and water on your pastry instead.

Later, I'd do chicken pot pies in little individual serving dishes with top and bottom pastry. The advantage there is that you can customize the pie to the consumer. My geezers like onions. I don't. With the individual pies, you can lay a slice on onion somewhere between the crusts, or drop in some little pearl onions with the soup and veggies, and the onion lovers are happy. Don't like peas? Leave 'em out of your pie, put them in everyone else's.

As for the chicken, you can buy some breasts, cook 'em and dice 'em up. Or, better yet, if you live near a Wal-Mart SuperCenter like I do, go buy one of Wal-Mart's rotisserie chickens already cooked. $4.88 gets you a cooked whole chicken, and all you have to do is take the meat off the bones. I'm all about convenience.

While I still make pastry now and then for pot pie, the meal evolved away from the crust as a time-saver, and now includes rice instead. Ladling some of the "filling" for the pie over plain old white rice works just fine, but take a walk on the wild side. Try cooking your white rice in chicken broth instead of water. Yum. Or, use brown rice or a wild rice blend.

Now I use a wild rice blend. It's a bit more expensive, but adds to the flavor possibilities. Since most wild rice has a nutty kind of flavor, go ahead and toss some nuts into the rice. Slivered almonds work great, but I suppose black walnuts or pecans would be just as good. Never had a pine nut that I recall, but I might try those one of these days. This last Sunday, I explored even more, adding some cooked barley and dried cranberries to the wild rice. Barley is kinda nutty-flavored too. It's very cheap, stretches the rice if you need to, gives you a contrasting shape in your rice bed, and is high in antioxidents and soluble fiber, I'm told. Dried cranberries are GREAT in rice dishes. I suppose raisins would be good too, if you're into those. As soon as pomagranites are in season again, I'll try it with that. If you don't own a rice cooker, buy one. You'll love it.

Anyway, chicken and rice makes a great meal. And it's cheap. You can feed a family of four for $10-12, and that includes the $4.88 Wal-Mart chicken. Give it a try.