Chicken pot pie

This week I decided to make some comfort food for my husband. So for dinner we had chicken pot pie.  I found an easy recipe from Nigella, but I tweaked it a bit. I added some green beans as well as sweet corn to the mix. Sadly I didn't have any bacon or marsala wine to use to I had to leave those things add. And I used store bought puff pastry which is so convenient.  Just roll out and use it.  Overall, I thought it turned out pretty nicely.  I managed to assemble it and pop it into the oven before I had to go pick up my hubby at the train station.  It was almost ready by the time we returned.  As we ate it, I added a drop of sriracha sauce to each bite. He kept staring at me as if I was an alien for using hot sauce.  Let's face it... a chicken pot pie is nice, but a bit hot sauce adds a nice kick to it.

Ingredients

• 3 rashers streaky bacon, cut or scissored into 2.5cm strips
• 1 teaspoon garlic oil
• 125g chestnut (cremini) mushrooms, sliced into 5mm pieces
• 250g chicken thigh fillets cut into 2.5cm pieces
• 25g flour
• 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
• 1 x 15ml tablespoon butter
• 300ml hot chicken stock
• 1 x 15ml tablespoon Marsala
• 1 x 375g (23 x 40cm) sheet all-butter ready-rolled puff pastry

Method

Serves: 2

1. Preheat the oven to 220°C/gas mark 7. In a heavy-based frying pan, fry the bacon strips in the oil until beginning to crisp, then add the sliced mushrooms and soften them in the pan with the bacon.
2. Turn the chicken strips in the flour and thyme (you could toss them about in a freezer bag), and then melt the butter in the bacon-and-mushroom pan before adding the floury chicken and all the flour left in the bag. Stir around with the bacon and mushrooms until the chicken begins to colour.
3. Pour in the hot stock and Marsala, stirring to form a sauce, and let this bubble away for about 5 minutes.
4. Take two 300ml pie-pots (if yours are deeper, don't worry, there will simply be more space between contents and puff pastry top) and make a pastry rim for each one - by this I mean an approx. 1cm strip curled around the top of each pot. Dampen the edges with a little water to make the pastry stick.
5. Cut a circle bigger than the top of each pie-pot for the lid, and then divide the chicken filling between the two pots.
6. Dampen the rim of the pastry again and then pop on the lid of each pie, sealing the edges with your fingers or the underneath of the prongs of a fork.
7. Cook the pies for about 20 minutes turning them around halfway through cooking. Once cooked, they should have puffed up magnificently.