Easy Mini Pot Pies

One hundred weeks. I have been writing about my life for one hundred weeks, and the life has changed in ways I could not have predicted when I started — the stove and the skillet and the soup are the same, but the kitchen now holds two cooks and the house holds five people and the woman who taught me to cook is sleeping twenty feet from where I stand each morning making her recipes. The proximity has changed everything. I no longer have to call Mama to verify a recipe. I can ask her. I can watch her. I can stand beside her and see the way her wrist turns when she stirs the roux, the way her fingers pinch the salt, the way her body leans into the stove the way a musician leans into an instrument. The translations are no longer translations. They are observations. And the observations are more accurate than any index card I could write.

James is deep in his final semester. He is taking AP English, AP History, and AP Government, and the workload is significant, but he carries it with the composure of a young man who has been accepted to college and whose anxiety has been replaced by the particular lightness of someone whose future has been decided, however temporarily. He still works at the bookstore on Saturdays. He still reads Morrison. He is, at eighteen, exactly who he was always going to be, and the recognition of this — that the boy contained the man, that the man was visible in the boy — is one of the quiet satisfactions of parenthood.

Carrie has noticed the change in the household and is adapting with her characteristic directness. She sat with Mama on the piazza Sunday afternoon and asked her questions about the Beaufort parsonage — what the garden looked like, what the view from the kitchen window was, what Daddy's voice sounded like. Mama answered with clarity and warmth, and the conversation was both an interview and a vigil — Carrie is preserving what Mama might forget, and the preservation is an act of love that I recognize because it is what I have been doing with the recipe cards. We are both, my daughter and I, archivists of Carolyn Simmons. We save what we can.

I made Mama's chicken and dumplings this week — the rolled kind, the Simmons kind — and Mama sat at the kitchen table and watched and corrected and hummed and the kitchen was full of two women and one recipe and the sound of a hymn that has been hummed in every kitchen Mama has ever stood in. The dumplings were perfect. They are always perfect when Mama is watching. Her watching is a form of cooking.

Mama’s rolled dumplings were perfect this week — they always are when she’s in the room — and I found myself wanting to stay inside that feeling a little longer, inside the particular satisfaction of encasing something warm and good inside pastry that your hands have worked themselves. These Easy Mini Pot Pies are the closest I can come to bottling that instinct for the rest of you: individual, handheld, sealed shut with a crimped edge the way Mama taught me to crimp, the filling rich and savory underneath. They are not chicken and dumplings, but they belong to the same family of dishes — the ones where dough is a form of devotion, and feeding people is a form of staying.

Prep Time: 20 minutes | Cook Time: 25 minutes | Total Time: 45 minutes | Servings: 6

Ingredients

2 cups cooked chicken, shredded or diced
1 cup frozen peas and carrots, thawed
1/2 cup frozen corn, thawed
1/3 cup butter
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1 3/4 cups chicken broth
2/3 cup whole milk
2 packages (14.1 oz each) refrigerated pie crust dough (4 rounds total)
1 egg, beaten (for egg wash)

Instructions

Preheat oven. Heat oven to 425°F. Lightly grease a standard 6-cup muffin tin or six 4-inch ramekins and set aside.
Make the filling. In a medium saucepan over medium heat, melt butter. Whisk in flour, salt, pepper, and garlic powder and cook for 1 minute, stirring constantly, until the mixture is pale golden and fragrant.
Build the sauce. Gradually whisk in chicken broth and milk. Continue stirring over medium heat for 4—5 minutes until the sauce thickens noticeably and coats the back of a spoon.
Add the filling. Remove from heat and stir in shredded chicken, peas and carrots, and corn. Taste and adjust seasoning. Let cool for 5 minutes.
Cut the crusts. On a lightly floured surface, unroll pie crust rounds. Using a round cutter or the rim of a bowl, cut circles slightly larger than the diameter of your muffin cups for the bottom crusts, and matching circles for the tops.
Line the cups. Gently press bottom crust circles into each muffin cup, easing the dough up the sides. Spoon filling generously into each cup, filling nearly to the top.
Top and seal. Place a top crust circle over each filled cup. Press edges together to seal, and crimp with a fork or your fingers. Cut a small vent in the center of each top crust. Brush all tops with beaten egg.
Bake. Bake at 425°F for 20—25 minutes, until crusts are deep golden brown and the filling is bubbling at the vents. If edges brown too quickly, tent loosely with foil.
Rest and serve. Let cool in the tin for 5 minutes before running a thin knife around the edges and lifting out. Serve warm.

Nutrition (per serving)

Easy Mini Pot Pies — The Dough Still Knows When Mama Is Watching