My hubby loves chicken pot pie

Hmmm, talk about comfort food. :-)

One lovely feature to this recipe is everything is cooked in one pot. Granted you have to move things around in bowls, but still, one pot means less hand washing in this house.

The inside was very tasty. Much improved over the frozen pot pies with rubbery chicken and mushy, watered-down veggies.

The outside was a little controversial. We're used to pot pies being encased in crust all the way around. This recipe puts a crust only on the top. The crust is the best part for me... She gives you options including leftover mashed potatoes, pie crust, frozen filo dough, or homemade biscuits. To shortcut, we used biscuits from a can. Sadly, our prefab biscuits did not cook all the way through. Next time we'll try one of her ideas.

Because we mucked with the recipe, we can't officially rate it. :-(

The Perfect Recipe

A pretentious title for a cookbook if you ask me. But regardless, this is our cookbook of the month. It's by Pam Anderson, editor at Cook's Illustrated.

Speaking of Cook's... I finally called them and got myself off their mailing lists. Whew, what a relief. To my surprise, I was later asked to fill out a web survey. They wanted to know why I had removed myself from their list and if there were any changes they could make to entice me back. The last question on the survey was "would you allow us to follow up with you?" and I said heck no! You had all the opportunity to respond to me when I sent my first email, which you *never* responded to!

After some light thinking, Cook's is not on my boycott list. It's not on my preferred list either.

Anyway, The Perfect Recipe. It's another comfort food book and has some overlap with the Martha Stewart book (who is in a bit of trouble these days, isn't she?) Like the Cook's Illustrated magazine, these recipes are the result of many trials and errors, with the thought process documented for you to learn from. Cooking is a science I tell you! And you have to eat your experiments!!

Recipes that have already been tried out of this book include the Macaroni and Cheese and the Occidental Stir Fry - both really great. The stir fry in particular teaches you to cook it with a flexible ingredient list. It's perfect for using up leftovers.