Potato Soup and Chicken Pot Pie

I have a really yummy recipe for potato soup. It's pretty basic, easy to make, and delicious.  It's a family recipe that I've tweaked over the years.  I also use almost the same recipe to make chicken pot pie and homemade chicken pot pie is fantastic.  It's been pretty cold recently so we've been making lots of soups and comfort foods.  I'll start with the soup recipe and then show you how to tweak it for chicken pot pie.

Potato Soup
2 medium sized potatoes
2 carrots
2 stalks of celery
1/2 onion
1 clove garlic minced
1/2 stick butter
1/4 cup flour
1 cup half and half
1 chicken bouillon cube or equivalent
salt and pepper to taste

Dice the potatoes, carrots, celery, and onion and put in a pot with garlic and just enough water to cover.  Ryan and I are not huge onion and garlic people so there's not that much in here, sometimes I even leave the garlic out.  If you do like a lot of onion and garlic you could double those quantities.  Add salt, bring to boil and let it sit until veggies are tender, about 8 minutes.

While the veggies are cooking, in a separate pan melt butter, add the flour when the butter has melted.  Mix the flour and butter together and let them cook together for a while over medium heat.  Don't let it burn.  Add the bouillon or better then bouillon, whatever you prefer to use.  I use chicken because that's what I have, but you could use vegetable if you wanted.  It just gives the soup a bit of extra flavor.  Add the  half and half , you could also use just plain milk, I've done this before when I don't have half and half, just use a little less so the soup is still thick. Let the mixture heat up until it becomes very thick.

Then just add the cream mixture to the veggies when they are done cooking.

Mix thoroughly over medium heat until the soup looks like potato soup.  If it's a little runny you can try to let it cook for a bit longer to thicken up, it will also thicken up a bit if you let it sit on the counter before serving.  If the soup is too thick just add more milk or  half and half.  Also, be sure to taste it and add salt and pepper.  I think I added 1/2 - 1 teaspoon of salt, just to give you an idea.

Serve while the soup is still warm.  Sprinkle some grated cheese on top.  We like to eat this with some french bread or garlic bread.  It also goes well in bread bowls.

This doesn't make a ton of soup, just barely enough for me and Ryan for dinner, and then usually a bit of leftovers for lunch the next day.  You could definitely double or triple the recipe for larger groups, I just made a smaller recipe for me cause we don't need that much for our small family.

Now, for the chicken pot pie recipe.  It's basically the same but you add grilled chicken.  And I usually add less liquid so it's not so soupy.  What I do is make everything the same, and then I use a slotted spoon to add the veggies and then add however much of the liquid I want until it's just right.  The other difference is that you make pie crust to put it in.  Use your favorite flaky pie crust recipe and make enough to line the pan and cover the top.  If you use the soup recipe above, this will give you enough for an 8 inch pie.  I usually cut that in half and put it in this smaller baking dish we have.  Again, this is usually enough for just us, and maybe some leftovers for lunch the next day.  Here's the bottom crust.

I fry up some chicken tenders in butter and salt and pepper.

Then I just add it to the soup mixture, and pour it into my crust.  Make sure to taste the mixture with the chicken before you add more salt.  The chicken and crust are a little salty so I don't usually add any extra salt when I'm making chicken pot pie like I do when I'm making soup.

Put the top crust on and pinch the edges together.  Bake in a 425 degree oven for 15-20 minutes, or until golden brown.  We're really just cooking the crust here, everything else has already been cooked.  You can let it set up a bit before serving or you can just serve right away which is usually what we do cause we're too hungry to wait.