Curry – a new ingredient for me. I’ve only had curry dishes a few times in my life so I was looking forward to cooking with it. The recipe comes from Alton Brown’s “Good Eats” episode “Casserole Over”. I used the recipe off of the Food Network site, but it is also in “Good Eats the Early Years”.

The Program

4 cups frozen vegetable mix, peas, carrots
1 to 2 tablespoons canola oil
3 tablespoons butter
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup chopped celery
1 1/2 cups low sodium chicken broth
1/2 cup milk
3 tablespoons flour
1 teaspoon curry powder
2 tablespoons dried parsley
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon fresh ground pepper
2 cups cubed cooked chicken
1 package puff pastry

The Prep

This is a very easy dish to prepare. There are a lot of ingredients and I recommend getting out your prep bowls and having everything measured, chopped and ready to roll. “Mise en place” – as the French would say. The only shopping we had to do for this was the curry powder and the frozen vegetables. I had stock and cubed chicken (from making the stock) in the freezer. And being a good student of Alton, I had a box of puff pastry in the freezer already!

The Process

Once you have everything prepped and ready to go, get your favorite stainless 3 quart or larger stainless saute pan and have at it. While you sweat the onions and celery on your main burner, get the milk and stock warming on another. From there you add the flour and curry to the pan let it cook a bit then build your sauce. Once it thickens a bit, add in the chicken and veggies and let them warm through. Then it’s as easy as pouring it in your baking dish and adding your puff pastry as the crust. Bake and enjoy!!

The Payoff

For as easy of a dish this was to prepare, it is pretty good. As you can see, it makes a ton. We definitely had some left overs. I could have used a little more curry. The curry flavor was there but for me it could have been a little stronger. It was also a little bit runny, but I believe that is because I didn’t fully cook out all the water in the frozen vegetables. As they cooked down, they sweat out. I guess that could have watered down the curry flavor as well… Over all it was pretty good for as easy as it was.

Enjoy!!