31 Days: the one with Chicken Pot Pie

Tonight we had chicken pot pie. It's one of my favorite recipes, but I don't make it very often because it's pretty involved. The longer we live here the better I become and figuring out good easy recipes, but from time to time I have to go back to some of my favorites. This is one of them.

First, I have to thaw the chicken. We buy our whole chickens frozen. You can get them fresh (and by fresh I mean alive), but they're more expensive and more work that way!

The Chicken Pot Pie can also be made from chicken breasts baked in the oven, but we usually can't find breasts in Geita so when I have them I save them for recipes that specifically require breasts.

The chicken starts cooking early in the day so that I will have enough time to pull apart all the meat and get the pot pie together before dinner.

Later in the day I remove the chicken from the bone and separate out the weird looking stuff for the dogs.

Next, I throw together a basic pie crust and put it in the fridge to chill. If you've never made a pie crust, do give it a try sometime. It's really not that hard. A basic pie crust is flour, a little salt and sugar, butter cut in, and a little cold water. Are you familiar with that whole cutting in thing? It's a process used in pie crusts, scones, biscuits, and sometimes streusel topping. Recipes usually call for a pastry blender, which is perfect for the job, but they often say, "pastry blender or 2 knives". Oh pray tell what DO they expect you to do with 2 knives?!! The first time I came across a recipe like this I didn't have a pastry blender and I remember staring at my mixture with 2 knives in hand thinking, "now what?" There is a better option if you don't have a pastry blender.
A big hole cheese grater.
You just grate the cold butter into the flour and then work it around with your hands. You're trying to get the butter down to pea sized pieces all mixed into the flour. I almost always use my cheese grater now, if I'm using butter. I also use margarine sometimes. I never used margarine in the states for anything, but butter is twice the price of margarine here and you can't always get it in Geita. And no, I don't chill the margarine. Don't tell Martha Stewart. I just use my room temp margarine and try not to overwork it.

In the evening I cook up the carrots, make the sauce and add the peas. Peas and carrots. There is no other way to do chicken pot pie in my opinion.

The finished chicken pot pie!

 This is what I love to see after dinner: leftovers! We'll be eating this again tomorrow night!

31 Days in My Tanzania Kitchen: the one with my pantry

So the Nester hosts this little 31 day thing every year, where all sorts of bloggers write on one topic every day for the entire month of October. I thought it sounded like fun so I'm joining in. Everyone chooses their own topic and mine is: 31 days in my Tanzania Kitchen

Please note that my kitchen is not TanzaniAN, but rather it is just located in Tanzania. That certainly does influence life in my kitchen, but I'm not proclaiming it to be typical of this location. In fact, the typical kitchen, at least in our area, is outdoor. Food is cooked on a charcoal stove and dishes are washed in a bucket.

At any rate, I thought it to be a broad enough topic that I could actually have something to share for 31 days and it might interest at least some of my readers. I'll include lots of different things that pertain to life in my kitchen here. So here we go, Day 1.

My Pantry

A pantry is pretty essential in my kitchen. We stock up on a lot of our food when we are in other towns and even bring back lots of items from the States. There are just things you can't get in Geita. My pantry doesn't actually hold all of it. We have boxes in various rooms throughout the house for overflow.

In addition to food items the pantry holds several appliances. Not sure if you can tell in the picture, but the fridge is tiny. I'm taller than it. Most fridges here are small and if ours were any bigger it wouldn't fit through the pantry door which would be a problem. The microwave sits on top of that. The deep freeze was my birthday gift our first year here and it was a pretty good gift. It enables me to make large amounts of tomato sauce, chicken stock, and pureed pumpkin at once. It also holds meats and cheeses that we buy in larger quantity in Mwanza or wherever else we travel.

One of my favorite features of our pantry is the water purifier in the corner. Carson actually added a pipe that funnels water directly into it. Whenever the filter gets low we just turn the valve on until it fills and then turn it back off. This is way easier than the norm which is filling bowls of water and dumping them in the top, plus it allows us to have the big thing more out of the way. It's nice having a husband who dreams of and implements such things!

That's it for the pantry. If you'd like to see what the rest of the kitchen looks like check out this post. (FYI- I actually USE my kitchen, so it's not usually that clean)

I'm thinking now that I should have chosen something different for the first day, but it's too late for a redo. If that didn't bore you to tears come back tomorrow to see what we're having for dinner :)

P.S.- If you usually come to the blog via the links I post on Facebook, I will not be posting links to every post in the 31 days series. I don't want to overwhelm your newsfeed with that, so be sure to add my blog to your reader or check back each day to follow this series.