Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi!
It has been a way to long since my last post (way back in July), and I have many excuses as to why I have been absent, but being that I am a teacher and very much dislike hearing excuses I’m not going to give you any of mine. In truth though the fall is insane for me with marching band, high school football, and our school wide musical all occurring during the months of September & October and I thank the Lord (literally) for my wonderful girlfriend who took over some of the cooking while I was attempting to locate my life 😉
Ok on to the food & music. It goes without saying that since this is a post during the Christmas season musically we are going the Christmas route; so let’s get you started off with a little high energy Christmas music today from Toby Mac and his band Diverse City – The First Noel.
Now onto the food. . . I had been itching to get back into the kitchen and after a long day of working at the OU football game I decided on a rather simple (simple being a relative term for me) recipe for Homemade Chicken Pot-Pie. And in addition to that I had the idea to make some Hot Spiced Wine as Em and I traveled to Target for the ingredients. So the meal is Chicken Pot-Pies with Hot Spiced Wine (both recipes will be under the recipes link at the top of the page).
And of course Ella wanted to help and explore the new “toys” i.e. the ingredients.
And along the way I will share pictures of Emily decorating as I cooked, she looks thrilled at my picture taking too. . . 🙂
Ok on to the food, one of the issues I ran into this evening was that I should have done some prep work that I hadn’t, this could have been resolved by me planning more ahead, but come on folks, that just isn’t my style. So regardless I had to wait a while as I hard-boiled some eggs and cooked a couple chicken breasts. After those were done I layered them and some peas & carrots into the dish.
On top of that I layered some chicken broth and cream of chicken soup, and then a final layer of biscuit mix with butter drizzled over the top and then into the oven it went!
Now onto the hot spiced wine. . . ! We used to drink this in my neighborhood growing up as we went Christmas caroling, so it’s been a long while, but I thought that it sounded like the perfect drink for the cold/windy evening here in Norman, Oklahoma. We had to improvise on this one because I misread the recipe (surprise!) so instead of needing 1 cup of pineapple juice like I thought we actually needed 2 cups. . .
We never got the 2 cups we needed, so I just added more orange juice, and it still tasted great! Into the sauce pan I added orange juice, pineapple juice, allspice, cloves, a couple of cinnamon sticks, and some orange peel, and then brought to a boil.
Then the next step is to throw in the wine! I just bought an 8 dollar bottle of merlot and it worked like a charm for this recipe.
After I added the wine and the pot pie was lightly brown on the top we were ready to roll!
And time to enjoy!!!
And I will leave you with a picture of my house with Christmas lights on it, and my cat Miles really wanted to say hi. . . so I let him. I hope you all have an exceptionally awesome Christmas/holiday season and I look forward to posting more frequently!
eats w beats 