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Cooking Books -> Meats
Pot Pies: Comfort Food Under Cover
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by:
Phillips, Diane
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Publisher:
Doubleday
Published: January 18, 2000
ISBN: 0385494580
Format:Hardcover
Pages:224
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Book Description
Amazon.com
Diane Phillips lures you into her cookbook with a picture of the perfect pot pie, topped with a lid of golden-brown, flaky crust. Inside this cookbook, though, you'll find that what Phillips offers is not your grandmother's labor-intensive
pot pie. Indeed, most of the 75 recipes are suited to the limited time and dietary desires of today's cooks. Her easy-to-assemble fillings emphasize chicken breast, lean meat, and other healthful ingredients, while the toppings can be put together in a
snap. About the only old-fashioned thing Phillips keeps in her pot pies is lots of full, intense flavor.
The first recipe, Chicken Bouillabaisse with Rouille Crust, tells it all. The filling consists of boneless thighs simmered with white wine,
saffron, tomatoes, and rice. For a crust, you spread toasted slices of French bread with a garlicky red pepper and olive oil purée, set them over the casserole-like filling, and bake until everything is bubbling hot. Reading on, you realize that Phillips
sees a pot pie simply as something covered by a layer of something. Ryan's Pie, chicken chunks in thyme-perfumed cream sauce under a puff pastry lid, is as close to classic as she gets. From there, you find such combinations as turkey meatloaf baked
under a layer of mashed potatoes enriched with bacon and sour cream, and lean pork, stewed Tuscan-style with red wine and vegetables, served under a polenta crust.
Phillips is so creative in working her idea that you are fascinated even by the
delicious-looking results from her most fanciful flights, in which everything from tortillas and risotto to slices of sautéed eggplant, mashed beans, ratatouille, and a blue-cheese custard serve as toppings. Among the least-expected choices are a
stir-fry topped with a pancake of pan-crisped noodles, and sautéed fish covered with mango salsa and passed under the broiler. Phillips tells when you can make a dish in steps, and how long each one keeps in the refrigerator and in the freezer. For those
concerned about fat, she tells how to substitute leaner choices in place of cheese, cream, and butter. If you like casserole cooking, want to get stimulating variety for basics like boneless chicken, and appreciate the value of one-dish meals, Pot Pies
will be a pleasing kitchen companion. --Dana Jacobi
From Publishers Weekly
Convinced that pot pies are the quintessential comfort food, Phillips (The Perfect Mix) has collected 85 recipes that take a new look at an old favorite. While she
praises the kind of cooking most baby boomers grew up with, her sophisticated dishes have nothing in common with the frozen pot pies of yesteryear and rely on ingredients from many regional and international cuisines. Phillips offers an abundance of the
kind of satisfaction that comes from good eating; however, many of the recipes... read more
Book Description
Eighty-five deliciously easy recipes for the quintessential comfort food, updated and dressed up for the twenty-first-century
palate.
All of us grew up with pot pies--homemade if we were lucky, otherwise store-bought. Either way, we all remember breaking through that flaky, buttery crust to get at the steaming, creamy chicken or beef or vegetables inside. Pot pies are,
in fact, the ultimate comfort food, conjuring up images of Mom in the kitchen and a milk-and-cookies kind of world.
Now, at the turn of the century, Diane Phillips brings pot pies back into our lives. And like us, they've grown up, developed a
sophistication and a range of tastes and styles. But at the same time, they remain just as comforting, soothing, and satisfying as the ones we remember with so much affection.
In Pot Pies: Comfort Food Under Cover, you'll find recipes for poultry,
meat, seafood, and vegetable pies, with flavors from Asian to French to Italian to Latino, Southwestern, Cajun, and plain old all-American. They may be covered in potatoes, like Old-Fashioned Chicken Pot Pie with Chive Mashed Potato Crust; biscuits, like
Mom's Beef Stew Topped with Sage Parmesan Biscuits; noodles, as in Oriental Chicken and Vegetables Topped with N
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