Easy Chicken Pie

The best thing about a roast dinner is making an easy Monday dinner with the left overs.  In this case, roast chicken on Sunday means chicken pie on Monday.  The easy bit is a cheat with some ready made puff pastry.  Although I love making my own, a working week day is not the time to be trying to get puff made from scratch.

As I rarely manage to find the  motivation to make my own chicken stock, the sauce that goes in this pie is made from instant vegetable stock.  I use Marigold vegetable stock which has a great depth of flavour and the most funky bright yellow colouring thanks to the turmeric in it.  The sauce is a simple roux (40g of butter to 2 tablespoons of plain flour) cooked out to take the raw taste off the flour and then the stock is slowly added (about 450ml) until you get a thick consistency.  The low fat of this sauce is what soothes my conscience when using all-butter puff which is hardly health food.  Be warned though, salt is the highest ingredient on the list of contents for the stock powder so don't add any to the sauce!

It is then just a case of adding some softened shallot, the cooked chicken and a handfull of frozen peas to the sauce, pouring it into a suitable pie dish (mine is a 1 litre volume, 8.5 inch pie dish) and topping with the pastry.  Pop it in the oven at 200 degrees C and in  40mins or so it is all ready to be eaten.