Tag: biscuits

Categories
Main Dish

You’ll have ‘fillings’ for this pot pie casserole

Chicken pot pie casserole is a great, homestyle meal that comes together quickly and easily for a weeknight meal.
Chicken pot pie casserole is a great, homestyle meal that comes together quickly and easily for a weeknight meal.

I have a ton of amazing memories about my paternal grandma, who passed away in 2012. She was such an awesome person and a crazy good cook.

Near the end of her life, she invited me over to her small apartment for dinner—just the two of us. She made a chicken and biscuits meal with some mixed veggies in it that was perfectly belly-filling and delicious. And, since she and I both had a serious ice cream addiction, we ended supper with a big bowl of it for dessert.

I don’t remember what all we chatted about while we sat at her small table, but I do remember the meal, which I suppose highlights the power of food in how we bond with one another.

That seemingly insignificant dinner popped into my memory this past week, when I stumbled on a recipe for a chicken and dumpling casserole. It reminded me so much of the meal she and I shared.

The recipe I used comes from the blog “Plain Chicken,” and while I generally like the base of this blog’s recipes, I often feel the need to add quite a bit to make them less, well, “plain.” You can find the original post at https://www.plainchicken.com/chicken-dumpling-casserole. I added herbs and veggies to my version, so I decided to dub it a “pot pie” casserole instead of just dumplings.

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Chicken Pot Pie Casserole

Chicken pot pie casserole is a great, homestyle meal that comes together quickly and easily for a weeknight meal.
Course Main Course
Keyword canned biscuits, casserole, chicken, dumplings, easy, mixed vegetables, pot pie

Ingredients

  • 1/4 cup butter melted
  • 3 to 4 cups chicken cooked and shredded
  • 12 ounces frozen mixed vegetables
  • 1 cup flour
  • 1 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup milk
  • 10.75 ounces cream of chicken soup
  • 2 cups chicken broth
  • 1 teaspoon rosemary
  • 1 teaspoon sage
  • 1 teaspoon thyme
  • salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

  • Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
  • Pour the melted butter into the bottom of a 9-by-13-inch baking dish and then spread the shredded chicken and mixed vegetables over top of it.
  • In a mixing bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt and milk until it’s smooth, and pour the mixture as evenly as you can over top of the chicken. You don’t need to stir or spread it out.
  • In the same mixing bowl (why cause more dishes?), whisk the cream of chicken soup, broth and herbs and spices together until smooth and pour it evenly into the baking dish. Again, you don’t need to stir or spread it out.
  • Bake for about 40 minutes or until the biscuit dough is a golden brown on top.
  • Serve with mashed potatoes.

The mashed potatoes were a perfect touch to give this casserole a very homestyle taste. The night I made this, I actually only had a bag of frozen carrots in the freezer, so ours was missing all of the mixed veggies goodness, but we still really enjoyed it.

As a side note, I used a rotisserie chicken for my version, and then after Joey graciously shredded all the meat off of it for me, I boiled the carcass for about 20 minutes with the herbs listed above to make my broth instead of buying some. It worked really well, and I had some broth left over to put in the freezer for next time.

I can’t tell you what recipe Grandma used when she and I sat down to our casserole nearly a decade ago, but as the old cliché goes, I know the main ingredient was love, and that’s really all that matters.

This piece first appeared in print on Aug. 13, 2020.

Spice Up Your Life is a weekly newspaper column written by Lindsey Young in south central Kansas. If you are interested in sponsoring this column, please contact us through the “Contact Lindsey” link at the top of the page.

Categories
Bread Breakfast

Biscuits always rise to the occasion

This recipe for homemade biscuits claims to boast a blue ribbon from the Texas State Fair. It’s not only easy but tasty, too.
This recipe for homemade biscuits claims to boast a blue ribbon from the Texas State Fair. It’s not only easy but tasty, too.

I have a confession to make: I hate using canned biscuits.

It’s not that I don’t like how they taste. It’s not that I have some sort of environmental or moral reason I don’t like them.

Plain and simple, I hate using canned biscuits, because every time I have to open a can, it scares the daylights out of me. It doesn’t matter how ready I am for the “pop” of the container opening, it still seems to give me heart palpitations.

The problem is that I absolutely love biscuits. Joey and I regularly enjoy having breakfast for dinner with a nice big plate of biscuits and sausage gravy, so I’ve always just put up with the terror (OK, maybe that’s a bit overdramatic) of opening canned biscuits.

It’s always been a necessity, because, unfortunately, despite my love of biscuits, my attempts at making them have always fallen flat (literally. Flat and a little tough.), so recently when I found myself without a tube of biscuits in the fridge and a craving for some breakfast for dinner, I was hesitant to try to go homemade, but the craving won out, and I went searching for a new biscuit recipe to try.

Lucky for my stomach, this time I was successful in my biscuit-making attempts, and Joey has officially banned the making of canned biscuits from here on out (which is perfectly fine with me).

The recipe I tried this time is supposedly one that a woman named Ruth used to make for the Texas State Fair every year, so I figured the whole state couldn’t be wrong. You can find the original recipe at http://www.bubblews.com/news/958224-cousin-ruthhomemade-biscuits-recipe, but I’ll warn you that whoever posted the recipe forgot to mention the baking powder, so make sure you add that in if you go to the Internet to make these.

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Cousin Ruth’s Homemade Biscuits

This recipe for homemade biscuits claims to boast a blue ribbon from the Texas State Fair. It’s not only easy but tasty, too.
Course Bread, Breakfast
Keyword biscuits, easy biscuits, homemade bread

Ingredients

  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 3 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 3/4 cups milk
  • 1/4 cup shortening

Instructions

  • Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
  • Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. Cut in the shortening until it’s well combined (the texture will become a bit mealy).
  • Add milk and stir. Turn the dough out onto a well-floured board and knead until all of the ingredients are well-combined and the dough is soft and easy to roll. If it’s too sticky, add a bit more flour. If it’s tough and hard to work with, add a little more milk.
  • After the dough is kneaded into a soft ball, roll it out to about half an inch thickness.
  • Use a biscuit cutter or a drinking glass to cut out biscuits. Continue to roll out dough and cut it into biscuits until all the dough is used (if you have a weird little bit left over, go ahead and bake it. It won’t be pretty, but it’ll still be tasty. That’s your “taste tester” piece!).
  • Place the biscuits on an ungreased baking sheet and bake for 12 to 15 minutes or until the biscuits are golden brown.

My biscuits puffed up beautifully, and they were delicious both on their own and smothered in gravy. We did discover that they weren’t quite as good as leftovers a couple days later, though, so you may have to suffer through finishing off the batch the same day you make them. (Oh, what horrible suffering, huh?)

If you’re like me and have had bad luck with biscuits, I hope these turn out as well for you as they did for me. I was pleasantly surprised with how easy they were to make, too. To be honest, it probably only added about 10 to 15 minutes to my overall routine over using the canned biscuits, and I didn’t once have to worry about scaring myself to death with the effort, and that, combined with how good these were, was well worth it.

This piece first appeared in print on Sept. 5, 2013.

Spice Up Your Life is a weekly newspaper column written by Lindsey Young in south central Kansas. If you are interested in sponsoring this column, please contact us through the “Contact Lindsey” link at the top of the page.

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