This is a cookbook that the church organization I grew up in put together in the 80’s or 90’s. My mom and aunt’s all contributed, as did one of my uncle’s (who is quite the chef!) so there was a lot of food that I was intimately familiar with. Our church also celebrated the Three Great Feasts described in Deuteronomy and those were times of a LOT of people coming together, and people need to eat. So I was familiar with more recipes just from going to Fairwood two to three times a year for a couple of days to a week. Most of these were from busy moms, with multiple children, on a budget. Not super hard or complicated, filling and easy on the grocery bill. Just what I as a lazy yankee want now ;-) This was a limited in-church printing, so there’s no chance of anyone getting one now, sadly. But soon after I graduated from Bibleschool in 2000 I requested a copy for my birthday and someone managed to scrounge one up for me. I really only wanted it for ONE recipe, and today is the day you all get to see it.
I’ve removed the cook’s name for privacy sake. Not theirs, as they probably wouldn’t care, but mine. I’m sure you already figured that out though, hahahaha. Because pictures aren’t always easy to read, I’m typing it out as well.
4 tbsp butter
4
tbsp flour
2 tsp salt
½ tsp pepper
½ tsp thyme
1
cup onions
1 cup chicken broth
1 cup cream or milk
2
cups cubed chicken
2 cups partially cooked peas and carrots
9in
pie pastry
Make pastry for a
9in pie. Make gravy with butter, flour salt, pepper and thyme. Remove
from heat and stir in broth and milk. Heat to boil, stir constantly,
boil 1 minute. Stir in chicken and vegetables and onions. Put in pie
and cover with top crust. Bake at 425degrees for 35-40minutes.
It is about the easiest home made recipe for anything I’ve ever made. Now, I must admit, I don’t make the pie crusts from scratch. I buy those premade ones.
Because Mrs B is vegetarian, we use soy protein instead of chicken (I think they call it vegi-chikken or something like that) and it tastes just like chicken to me. No chance of getting salmonella poisoning from undercooking it either. They come in strips and once it’s cooked I just use a pair of scissors to cut it up into cubes. Easy peasy. We usually make two because Mrs B doesn’t like black pepper in hers, while I like double the amount AND I always double the amount of thyme in mine as well. I also add quite a bit more onion than Mrs B is comfortable with. To make it easy to tell which one is mine (with all its flavorful goodness), we have taken to using a regular pie plate and a square 8x8 pyrex container. It works great and there is zero guessing about whose pie is whose.
And there you go, an easy and delicious chunk of food that will last you the weekend. If you’re not a pig. Oink, oink.
