Chicken and Leek Pie

So...I'm not even sure why I'm posting this as this dish didn't exactly turned out as planned, but I guess that's all part of it.  Am I right?

My recipe of the week this Wednesday was a Chicken and Leek Pie from The Fabulous Baker Brothers.  Sounds delicious and amazing, right?  Well the deliciousness and amazingness should come from following the recipe that was given to me, which I didn't necessarily do.  I generally go off and make up my own stuff in the middle of a recipe and it turns out pretty well, but there were definitely questionable moments with this endeavor.  That, and the fact that I've never made anything pie-like in my entire life without my mom's supervision, made for an interesting evening of cooking.

I guess let's start.  The Cast of Characters includes....2 leeks, an onion, a garlic clove, mushrooms, 6 chicken thighs, shortcrust pastry (which is different from puff pastry, I came to find out), 6 rashers (bacon), flour, heavy cream, white wine (even though I used sherry...more on that later), and a variety of herbs and spices of your choosing.  This recipe calls for lots of tarragon and thyme but I couldn't find tarragon so I improvised.  Or something.

Start by heating up a pan and frying up those rashers/bacon.

Then, chop the head off the top of your leeks...

Slice them down the middle....

And rinse the leeks out in cold water.  Evidently they can be dirty and grimy in there from the ground!  Who knew.

Then slice them up!

Melt a "good knob of butter" (according to those Baker Bros.) in a pan. 

And toss those leeks in the melted butter to cook down and soften.  It may look like a ton of leeks but they reduce waaayyyyy down.  Whew!

Slice up an onion.

And add that to the pan too.

And...you know me!  I'm a mushroom girl.  I add mushrooms even when the recipes don't call for it.  So in they go!  There's plenty of room for everybody, let's not be exclusive here.

Meanwhile, cut up those rashers into chunks.  Yum yum.  Oh, and add a chopped glove of garlic to your veggie mixture.  Forgot that.

Then have your husband perform surgery on the chicken thighs.  You know, I never really used to cook with dark meat but a year ago I started and now I LOVE chicken thighs.  In the States you can buy them boneless and skinless but not here!  That would be way too easy.  So Drew deskinned them (is that a word?) and attempted to get all the slippery meat off the bone, God love him.  Not an easy job but someone had to do it.

Cut up the chicken into small chunks and brown that up in a pan too.

After your leek/onion/shroom mixture has cooked down and gotten nice and brown, and you've added the desired herbs and stuff (I used thyme, rosemary, salt, pepper, and some garlic), add 2 heaping tablespoons of flour to the mixture.  Stir that up.

This is where the trouble started.  It then calls for a "good glass of white wine" or 150mL if you look at the other recipe I kinda piggybacked off of.  That's around 5-6 ounces.  I didn't have white wine and we only DRINK red wine so I didn't feel like buying more white.  So I thought I could use sherry!  Why not?  I'll tell you why not: sherry is disgusting when used in massive quantities and it overpowers everything and ruins the dish you've been working so hard at!  

So like I said...I dumped in a big ol' glass of sherry.  Not even thinking.  Awesome.

I stirred the sherry into the flour veggie mixture to thicken it up, but really..it turned into more of a gray, gummy paste.  Great!  Just f-ing great.

Then it tells me to dump the cooked chicken and rashers into my gummy pasty mixture.

Stir that up.  And then add 142mL of heavy cream OR some creme fraiche.  I opted for the heavy cream and I'm pretty sure this is what salvaged some of this dish.  Heavy cream makes everything better!  Except your waistline.  But I can't worry about that right now.

The cream helped the mixture be...well, creamy, and not so gummy and gross.  And it made it taste better too, DUH.  We tasted it and thought it needed some heat, so we started throwing in all kinds of heat-inducing spices.  None of which I'll tell you about because none of them probably go together and I'll be even more embarrassed about this dish than I already am.  

Here's where more trouble starts: the shortcrust pastry.  You're supposed to roll this stuff out and place it in a pie dish.  I don't have one of those so I basically used a meatloaf dish.  Hopefully it would be ok. Also, even though I'd be thawing it out for 2 days in the fridge, it was still partially frozen.  So it cracked as I rolled it out and put it in my rectangular dish, so this picture below is our version of a glued-together dough layer.  Shit.

What a joke.

Then...take your now hopefully-decent-but-still-tastes-a-lot-like-sherry mixture and pour that into the weird looking pastry dough.

Distribute it all in there, and realize that your dish is way too big/deep for the filling.  Panic. 

Get out a SMALLER pyrex dish and place the other sheet of shortcrust pastry in there (that was supposed to go on the top of the other one) and turn your filling into this other dish.  Continue panicking.

THEN, take the former bottom crust from the other dish that now has gooey filling residue all over it and dump that out, inverting it onto your other pie/casserole dish to become the top of the new one.  Realize that this isn't f-ing working and frantically try to make a top crust out of gooey scraps.  Chug wine.  

THIS, my friends, is how this delightful pie was supposed to look:

THIS, is how my piece-of-shit pie turned out:

What a big, horrible disaster.

Sigh.  There's nothing we could do to fix it so we shoved it in the 400 degreeish oven and let it bake for about 30 minutes and...voila!  Here is our disheveled-looking pie.

We were nervous, but it turned out...better than we thought.  Definitely had a strong hint of sherry, but the cream and other stuff I dumped in there certainly helped.  Serve with some mixed greens and you've got yourself a pretty ok meal!

This kitchen attempt was a pretty huge mess but it still tasted ok - and I have to remind myself that this is what trial and error cooking is all about.  It's not always gonna be good or perfect but it's a learning experience!  You can find the recipe I followed here and another one with slightly different ingredients here.  

I also need a name for my weekly cooking segments on my blog.  Anyone got any ideas??   Come on people, I need yall's help!

Happy Friday!