Homemade chicken pot pie – a weekend labor of love

What I love about weekends is having time to make good food that will give my family leftovers during the week — and challenge my cooking skills a little. I learned by watching my southern mother, so I grew up cooking somewhere between what I remembered seeing her do and what I could find in a recipe book. With the weather finally starting to cool down, I decided it was time to fire up the oven and make something substantial: homemade chicken pot pie. Marie Callender’s makes a pretty tasty frozen pie, but there’s always one ingredient someone in my family objects to. Corn, mushrooms, peas — you name i

  I found a recipe online and had most of what I needed, but I wanted to jazz it up. Instead of cooking and shredding chicken breasts, I headed to the store for a rotisserie chicken. I picked up a can of carrots, too, and figured I was set.

   As I pulled the meat from the bones, with visions of rotisserie chicken pot pie in my head, I remembered that the recipe called for chicken broth. I hadn’t bought any. Normally, I would have thrown away the bones, but this time I stopped. There were carrots and leftover celery in the refrigerator. With an onion, a bay leaf and a few spices, I had the makings of a homemade chicken broth. I’d seen someone make it on TikTok over Christmas. How hard could it be?

Use homemade chicken broth instead of storebought

   I put the chicken bones in a pot, covered them with water and started adding vegetables. In went some carrots I’d forgotten to eat during the week, half an onion — skin and all — and a few pieces of garlic. It took more effort than dissolving a bouillon cube in hot water, but it also helped me clean out the fridge and get one more use from the chicken. Luckily, I’d started early. The broth needed to simmer for a good two hours. If you’d like to make a vegetable broth, we found this recipe at Oh My Veggies.

Family comfort food at its best

   Then it was time for the homemade chicken pot pie. The filling was simple: shredded chicken, onions, carrots and celery in a creamy sauce made with butter, flour, broth and milk. The recipe called for canned potatoes, carrots and peas. There’s nothing wrong with canned, but I already had potatoes at home, so I chopped and boiled three of them until tender. I used celery in place of peas because my family would enjoy it more.

   The simmering broth had made the kitchen smell amazing. I measured out what I needed for the pie and jarred the rest while it baked. Now I have homemade broth ready in the freezer for another few meals — and I know exactly what went into it.

   Back-to-basics cooking doesn’t mean making everything from scratch or following a recipe exactly. Sometimes it means looking at what you have before buying something else.  If you have leftover rotisserie chicken, try this Lemon Chicken & Onion Soup.

Reduce food waste, more for later

   A chicken carcass becomes homemade chicken broth. Vegetables left in the drawer help create homemade chicken pot pie. An onion brings flavor to both the broth and the filling for cooking from scratch. It’s family comfort food at its best.

   You can make the habit even easier by saving clean onion ends and carrot peels in a freezer bag for your next batch of broth — by using leftover vegetables, you are reducing food waste. Freeze extra broth in measured portions for soup, rice or another pot pie. And when a recipe calls for a vegetable your family won’t eat, use one they will. That’s one of the pleasures of cooking at home: you get to make dinner your own.