Feeling a bit nostalgic this weekend for the cool-weather comfort food of my youth . . . specifically, chicken pot pie . . . I jumped on my bike yesterday and rode to the Dupont Circle farmers market to do some shopping.  I have a small confession to make: to paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of the death of DC-area farmers market abundance (a rumor I began here on Saturday) have been greatly exaggerated.  The Dupont Circle farmers market was rockin' yesterday.  And I took a bunch of pics to prove it, but my camera's been misbehaving lately and the image file was somehow corrupted, so you're just gonna have to trust me on this one.  To be certain, the 14th & U market I visited on Saturday was a bit depressing, but it's the area's newest market . . . in its first year . . . and has been small even at the height of the growing season.  At any rate, there was much beautiful food to be had at the Dupont Circle market yesterday, including a vegetable I had never noticed or eaten before: cardoon.



Why did cardoon catch my attention?  Because I was looking for celery for my chicken pot pie and I couldn't find any, but cardoon looks like big-ass wild celery (approx. 3 ft. stalks).  So I asked the vegetable-pushers from Next Step Produce, a farm in Newberg, MD, to tell me about it.  I learned that it's a vegetable popular in France, Italy, Spain, (maybe) Greece (can any of my Greek peoples confirm or deny?) and elsewhere in Europe, but only recently grown and marketed commercially in the U.S.  The folks at Next Step Produce describe it as a cross between artichoke, celery and salsify; and they told me it takes a bit of work to prepare.  The tough outer ribs need to be removed to reduce bitterness in the end product and it needs to be soaked in acidulated water (i.e., water with vinegar or lemon or lime juice added) to prevent it from browning rapidly and looking ugly in the end product.  I'm always up for an adventure, so I bought the bunch pictured above for $4 and went on my way.

Back to the chicken pot pie . . . one of the problems with my frequent feelings of nostalgia for food is that my recreations don't live up to my expectations—not necessarily because my recreations aren't good, but because my nostalgic memories are way overblown.  I know I'm not alone in this.  Tony Bourdain wrote of this in A Cook's Tour, where he returned as an adult to the south coast of France, the cite of childhood culinary epiphanies, and was generally disappointed with the food.  (However, as an adult, he loved the food in other parts of France.)

But with chicken pot pie I figured this wouldn't be the case because I grew up eating lousy Swanson chicken pot pies from the frozen foods section of my family's little grocery store.  If I couldn't improve on Swanson, I had no business being in the kitchen!  I turned to my favorite cookbook, the New Best Recipe, for a starting point, but with plans for some minor modifications.  [Edit 11/6/07: My mother was mortified when she read here that the only chicken pot pies I remembered from my youth were Swanson's.  She claims to have made great ones—though admits that it's possible she did so only for my baby sister after I moved out.  Nevertheless, I'm sure my mother makes a great chicken pot pie.  I just don't think she ever made one for me!]

Before launching into the chicken pot pie recipe, I needed to make some chicken stock.  I usually keep some on hand, but had run out.  Just about every week I buy a chicken from Eco-Friendly Foods at the Dupont Circle farmers market (a company with close ties to Joel Salatin, star of one of my favorite books, the Omnivore's Dilemma), which I butcher into parts, saving the wings and back in my freezer to make stock once a month or so.  Later this week I plan on blogging on butchering chickens and making stock, so stay tuned.  But back to the chicken pot pie.  Here's a pic of my mise en place:



The chicken pot pie recipe was easy.  I began by braising/poaching (How much liquid does it take to turn a braise into a poach?  The chicken was nearly but not quite covered by the stock.) 1.5 lbs of boneless, skinless chicken in 2 cups of chicken stock in a dutch oven.  I then removed these ingredients, separating the chicken from the stock.  Next, I put a bit of vegetable oil in the dutch oven and sautéed a chopped onion, 3 carrots and about a cup of the cardoon (prepared as indicated above) for about 5 minutes.  I removed these veggies from the dutch oven, adding them to the chicken and then, in the dutch oven, made a roux out of a half-stick of unsalted butter and a half-cup of flour, then wisked in the chicken stock (which had grown in volume from the original 2 cups to nearly 3 cups from the liquid released by the chicken when braising), along with 1.5 cups of whole milk and about three tablespoons of fresh thyme and a splash of white wine, whisking constantly until the sauce thickened . . . about 3 minutes.  I then poured this sauce into the bowl containing the chicken and sautéed veggies, added about a cup of previously-frozen-but-thawed edamame (standing in for the more typically used peas) and about 3 tablespoons of fresh, minced flat leafed parsley, and mixed it all together before pouring it into a Pyrex casserole dish:



I finished the dish off by cheating a bit and using some store-bought puff pastry dough to top the pie, instead of making my own crust.  Yep, I sometimes take short-cuts . . . but at least I only pulled puff pastry dough from the supermarket freezer, instead of pulling out a Swanson chicken pot pie, right?  I baked it for 30 minutes on 400 degrees and here's the finished product:



It's not much to look at, but it tasted great . . . way, way better than Swanson's!  The thyme was the most pronounced single ingredient, but wasn't overpowering.  And though the cardoon has the look and texture of celery, it's flavor was a mild, pleasant, unique artichoke-like addition to the dish.  This was one instance in which the present food experience beat the nostalgic food memory.  I was eating alone, and I was tired, so I ran out of steam near the end and didn't pay much mind to presentation.  If I were to make this again for guests, I'd ladle the pot pie guts into individual oven-safe bowls and top each one with dough.  In a prettier-looking form, I'd be happy to serve it to guests on a chilly evening.  I probably will within the next few months and I'll report back on how it goes.