101 Uses for a Roast Chicken #16: Chicken & Biscuits

One of the consequences of roasting so many chickens is that I tend to accumulate a lot of chicken carcasses, and since I'm a little sick of chicken soup and coming up with new variants of chicken soup, I had to come up with some new and exciting way of using the carcasses up. When I went to my freezer last week, I had three carcasses sitting in there! That's a lot of carcasses!

Thankfully, the universe has a way of speaking to me indirectly at times. For one thing, I've seen several chicken pot pie recipes crop up in the posts of many of my regular food blogger pals. And then at work a couple of weeks ago, chicken pot pies were on the menu and I made the pastry for them. The wheels started turning...

So, I got out the carcasses and put them in my crock pot and made a stock with less water than normal. I also used fewer aromatics - just carrots, onions, garlic, and cilantro. I wound up with quite a bit of chicken meat and about 4 cups of stock. I had left over cream and whole milk from my hamburger buns, so I put that to good use.

Here's what I did, approximately.

3 cups chicken meat
2 cups chicken stock
1 lb mushrooms, sliced
1 green pepper diced
4 green onions, sliced
1 medium onion, diced
1/3 cup flour
1 cup cream
1 cup whole milk
2 tsp basil
1 tsp ground sage
salt & pepper to taste
garlic, crushed, to taste

Saute the veggies until soft & have released all liquid. Add stock and spices and bring to a simmer. Combine the milk & cream and add flour to make a slurry. Add slurry to the pot & simmer until thickened. Season. Allow to cool slightly. It will thicken further as it cools.

Now, I thought this was too liquidy for a pie filling so I opted for a biscuit topping instead. The biscuit recipe I used is here, as part of a recipe for a similar dish by Canadian Living's test kitchen. I my filling fit into a 9x13 pan, and this is how it turned out:

Pretty fracking great, IMO. I got lots of meals out of this and wound up freezing some of it, too. It was tasty and not as rich as some fillings I've had before - lighter but still creamy enough. I'd definitely make this again.