Warm Your Innards Chicken Dinner

I promised myself to make at least one new recipe each month. The pressure is now off for January.

Last week I started PVRing (recording) several cooking shows. I have the machine scheduled to record each episode, then I can quickly review the recorded shows, delete those that don't interest me and then pay attention to any that do. I found a couple on Saturday to inspire me and so today, after getting groceries, I made the "Starvin' Guy Chicken Pie" from the Food Network show, "Eat, Shrink & Be Merry". It's a reduced fat, reduced calories version of the usual chicken pot pie recipes. And I must say, I think it's pretty good. Kevin liked it, too. Greta and Janet are the hosts of the show and they remind me a bit of the women who host "The Shopping Bags". I didn't have the size of ramekins recommended for the recipe but my old french onion soup bowls worked perfectly. They're a little bigger than the ramekins and so I had enough extra biscuit dough to make 4 extra biscuits.

Things I learned and liked about the recipe include:

1. It recommends using all the meat from a roasted deli chicken for a couple of reasons: a) It's cheaper to buy a whole roasted chicken than to buy the usual pack of chicken breasts, plus you get both light and dark meat, and b) you get a "roast chicken" flavour.
2. I learned that condensed milk is good for low fat, low cal cooking. I didn't know that.
3. I liked the biscuit dough, for which you use 3/4 cup of mashed sweet potato. Yummy! The mashed sweet potato takes the place of most of the butter. You only use 2 Tbsp of butter in the whole recipe, plus an extra little bit to brush on the top of the biscuits. Very tasty! Oh ... and on the topic of "sweet potatoes", I think they used yams in the recipe and that's usually what I see at the store but today they had both yams and sweet potatoes. The sweet potatoes are about the same colour as a yukon gold potato but when tasted, is definitely a sweet potato.
4. Next time I will reduce the 1 teaspoon thyme to half.
   

A very satisfying recipe. Very filling. Great on such a cold day.

Find the recipe at the Eat, Shrink and Be Merry website. Take a look around while you're there. There are some other recipes that look good, too.