Chicken And Dumplings

It was a balmy 8* here yesterday morning.  That's a lttle cool for a fall day (winter's a week away) in the South.

We have friends who basically don't cook and we like to regularly invite them over for a home cooked meal. Tonight’s choice was chicken and dumplings, and as with her potato soup, Bev is a purist – thickened chicken broth & milk, chicken, and dumplings. I’d prefer it be made with some veggies, like Debbie's over at A Feast For The Eyes, but this version is still awfully good. The one thing we did borrow from Debbie was to brown the chicken skin before removing it.

When the skin was browned, Bev deglazed the pan with some homemade chicken stock, removed the chicken skin, and cooked the chicken in the broth. When done, she removed the chicken to cool and added milk and flour to the pot to get the desired volume and thickness. She then de-boned and shredded the chicken, added it back to the pot, and mixed up her drop biscuits, using Pioneer Brand Baking Mix.

She dropped the biscuits in the pot a spoonful at a time and here they are cooking.

I got busy visiting with our company and sipping on some V. Sattui Gamay Rouge wine, and I forgot to take more pictures, which was a shame as my bowl looked outstanding and it tasted just as good - serious comfort food for a cold Saturday evening.

For our snow day on Monday it was chili pie and I think some recipes deserve repeating - Bev's Mexican cornbread.  We made some chili the other day and I didn't blog about it because it just looked like chili and we just added and tasted, so there is no recipe - except it was half beef and half venison and very good.  So for this meal she did as usual - pour the cornbread mixture in a cast iron skillet, top with the chili, and bake - the cornbread will come to the top.  This is the result after flipping to cornbread down when plating and adding a little diced onion and shredded cheese:

Pretty good eats, sitting in front of the fire on a cold day.  Click on pics to enlarge.

Have a great day and thanks for visiting Almost Heaven South - although you wouldn't know it from our temps.

Larry